Nightmare City

1.

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.

2.

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.

Tom continued into the bathroom, trying to explain the odd silence to himself. Maybe they’d run out of eggs and Mom had ducked out to the store for a minute to do the shopping. Or maybe she’d gotten up late and was just going down to the bottom of the driveway to get the newspaper.

Whatever. He washed up and shaved and stopped thinking about it. He was wondering instead if the Dodgers had won last night—for a change—and trying to remember who the starting pitcher had been.

He toweled the shaving cream off his face and took a look at himself in the mirror. He didn’t like his looks much. He didn’t think his face looked brave or noble or cool like his brother Burt’s face. But then maybe, like a lot of people, he couldn’t see himself as others saw him. The fact was, when he used his fingers to brush his black hair back, his blue eyes shone out intense, smart, steely and unwavering. His features were narrow and sharp, serious and purposeful. He didn’t see it himself—he couldn’t see it—but anyone else who looked at him recognized a young man who knew how to go after what he wanted, a young man who could not easily be turned away.

He came out of the bathroom, went downstairs, thumping half the way down, creating the satisfying thunder of a buffalo stampede, then leaping the rest of the way, his hands on the banisters, his sneakers hitting the floor so hard when he landed that the light fixture in the foyer ceiling rattled. Now he was sure his mom wasn’t here, because normally when he came down the stairs like that, she’d call out to him with some snarky remark like, “Hark, I hear the pitterpatter of little feet.” Or something. But there was nothing. No noise in the house at all. Just silence.

He glanced out through the sidelight next to the front door, looking past the gold star decoration on the glass. Well, that’s weird, he thought. A puzzle. His mom’s Civic was in the driveway. So she hadn’t gone to the store. So where was she?

Tom was about to turn away when his sharp eye noticed something else, too. The newspaper was there, outside, lying at the end of the driveway where the delivery guy had tossed it. That really was strange. His mom was the only one in the house who read the paper. Tom got the sports scores off his phone and checked the rest of the news online. But his mom—the first thing she did every morning—the second she came downstairs, before she started making breakfast, before she did anything—was bring in the paper so she could read it while she drank her coffee.

So yeah—a puzzle: Where was she?

“Mom?” he called.

Just the silence in answer. And it was that kind of silence that goes down deep. It made Tom feel sure that the house was empty.

He opened the door and stepped out. He went down the driveway, the gravel crunching under his feet. Bent down to pick up the paper. Straightened—and again, he paused. And again, it was strange… Like, really strange.

Tom lived in Springland, California. It was a small beach town north of L.A. Usually the weather was just about perfect here—clear skies, sixty-five degrees in winter, eighty in summer, seventy in between. Today, though—though it was late April—it was cold and damp. The marine layer—the fog—had come in off the water, and come in thick. To his right, Tom could see past the Colliers’ driveway next door, and after that there was nothing but a wall of drifting white mist. Same to his left: he could see the Roths’ driveway and the Browns’ across the street—and then nothing but fog, slowly swirling in the early morning breeze.

But that’s not what was so strange. The fog was like that sometimes here. It would totally shroud the place in the morning, then burn off by noon and give way to a clear, warm Southern California day. No, it wasn’t the fog that made Tom pause.

It was the silence. Deep silence. Just like in the house. It made Tom feel like the entire neighborhood was empty. Which was crazy.

Alert, that pulse of curiosity beginning to rise in him, he turned his head slowly from side to side, looking, listening. Something was missing here. What was it?

It came to him. Birds. There were no birds singing. No birds singing on an April morning. What was that about? Must’ve just been some sort of coincidence, all the birds stopping at once, a bird coffee break or something, but then… where was the noise from the freeway? The freeway wasn’t even a quarter of a mile away. Normally Tom didn’t hear it because he was so used to the constant whoosh of traffic that it just sort of faded into the background of his mind. But it was always audible. He could always hear it if he listened. And yet, he was listening now—and he didn’t hear it at all.

Something new rose beneath his curiosity: fear. Not a lot of fear: he was sure there was a reasonable explanation for all this. But a definite chill went through him, a finger of ice reaching up out of his inner darkness and touching him on the spine. No bird noise? No freeway noise? And no one on the street? What was this? Normally there’d be someone around. Stand here long enough and you’d see Mrs. Roth walking her dog or Mr. Collier taking out last night’s garbage. A car driving past. Or old lady Brown—Mrs. Brown’s mom, who lived with the Browns—looking out at him from the window in the gable upstairs. That was pretty much all she did all day: look out her upstairs window at the neighborhood, at anyone who was passing. But the gable window was dark. There was no one there. There was no one anywhere as far as Tom could see.

Still feeling that little chill of fear, Tom turned again and looked into the thick fog. A thought went through his head. It was a really unpleasant thought. He suddenly had the idea that something was moving in there, moving unseen in the depths of the mist. He had the idea that whatever it was—whatever was moving in the fog—was coming toward him, shuffling slowly toward him so that any minute now it would break out of the swirling whiteness and he would see it…

Tom gave a snort of a laugh. Imagination kicking into overdrive, that’s all it was. “Silliness,” as his mother would call it. And in this case, she’d be right. He was creeping himself out with silly thoughts. His reporter’s mind looking for a puzzle where there was none. The marine layer was thick this morning, that’s all. The fog muffled the noise—bird noise, freeway noise, all the noise. And as for the rest, it was a quiet street. It was Saturday. People were sleeping in. There was nothing strange about any of it.

You’re being kind of an idiot, Tom told himself.

He started back up the path with the paper in his hand.

So where was his mother, then? The question niggled at him. He could never let a question go until he had the answer. Still, he tried to shake it off.

She was probably abducted by aliens, he told himself. That has to be the most reasonable explanation, right? Either that or she took a walk. But nah, I’m going with aliens. That’s gotta be it.

Tom was smiling to himself—smiling at himself—as he stepped back into the house. Smiling, he shut the door behind him. Smiling, he tossed the newspaper onto the front hall table: whap.

Then he stopped smiling.

He heard something. He heard a voice. It wasn’t his mother. It was a man talking. It was coming from inside the house.

Tom was still a little spooked by the idea that had come to him outside—the idea that there had been something moving around in the fog. His heart beat a little quicker as he walked down the hall toward the sound of the voice. With every step he took, the voice grew louder, more distinct. He started to be able to make out some of the words the man was saying.

“…your mission… what you have to do… remember…”

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.

3.

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.

Tom moved around the brightly lit family room until he could see the front of the TV. There on the screen, sure enough, was the doctor show in progress. It was the usual sort of scene: a bunch of doctors and nurses and aides crowded frantically around a gurney as they rolled it into the emergency room. Everybody shouting about a GSW—which meant a gunshot wound, as Tom knew from a Sentinel story he’d written about the Springland police. Tom couldn’t see the patient on the gurney, but he was sure it was someone on the brink of death. Patients were always on the brink of death on The Cooper Practice. Nothing new about that. Nothing strange at all.

But where had Mom gone off to after she turned the TV on?

Tom found the remote lying on one of the chairs. He picked it up and clicked the TV off.

“Mom?” he shouted.

But no—no answer here either. There was just the same silence as there was upstairs: that silence that made him feel the place was empty.

All right, he thought. Enough of this stupidity. Let’s find out what’s going on. Right now.

Tom jogged upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pausing only to hit the light switch at the top. (Electricity costs money, he could practically hear his mom say.)

He swung round the corner. Jogged down the hall. Up the stairs again. Back into his bedroom. He retrieved his cell phone from where it was still lying on the worktable. He hit the button to call up his speed-dial list.

“What?” Tom whispered aloud into the silent house.

The speed-dial list was empty.

All right. Must’ve accidentally erased the list. Or something. No big deal. He went into his contacts list.

Again Tom spoke out loud, more than a whisper this time: “What. Is. Going. On?”

His contacts list had been completely erased as well.

For a second, Tom actually considered the possibility he was still dreaming. Sure, why not? You see stuff like that in the movies, right? Guy has a scary dream, sees a monster. Then he thinks he wakes up; he thinks he’s safe. Then—Frang!—the monster leaps out at him, and it turns out he only dreamed he was waking up and he’s still in the nightmare. Maybe it was like that, Tom thought: he had dreamed he was in heaven and then…

But he looked up and his eyes traveled around the room, his room. His familiar room with everything where it ought to be. And he knew this was real, this was really happening. It was no dream.

Okay, he thought. Don’t panic. Think. You’re a reporter. Find the answer. Figure it out.

He knew his mom’s number by heart. She had told him once: The problem with speed dials and contacts lists is that you never need to memorize a phone number. And he had said: Why would you ever want to memorize a phone number? And she had said: Well, in case you’re lost somewhere without your phone. And he had replied sarcastically: Yeah, Mom. Like that’s gonna happen!

But all the same, Mom wasn’t a big worrier, so when she did worry, it stuck in his head. He’d memorized her number one day, just in case.

He dialed the number now.

As the phone started ringing against his ear, he moved back out of the room, back down the hall to the stairs. He was just starting down the stairs again as the ringing stopped.

And there—hallelujah!—there was Mom, her voice coming over the phone: “Tom?”

Tom rolled his eyes with relief. “Mom! There you are!”

“Tom, can you hear me?” Mom said.

“Yeah, I’m right here,” he said into the phone loudly. “Where are you?”

“Tom! Tom, are you hearing me?”

“Mom, I’m right here!” he shouted. “Can you hear me? I’m at home. Where are you?”

There was a pause. Then something awful happened, something that made Tom’s stomach go hollow with fear. He was just coming off the last stair into the front hall again when he heard Mom say, “Oh, Tom, please say you hear me! Please! Please…”

Tom opened his mouth to answer her, but only a whisper came out. “Mom?”

Mom was crying. He could hear it. She was crying hard. And that was bad. Mom almost never cried. Mom was a girl, and a very girly girl, but there was something really tough about her, too, something really strong. She cried when they buried Burt. She cried when the lieutenant colonel handed her the folded flag from Burt’s coffin, the overlong, coffin-sized flag that now hung on Tom’s bedroom wall. She cried then, sure. Tom cried, too. Everybody cried, even the lieutenant colonel. But that’s what it took—that’s how much it took to make Mom break down in tears. Other than that, it just didn’t happen.

Except that she was breaking down now on the phone.

“Tom, you have to hear me! You have to!” she said, her sobs almost overwhelming the words.

Tom practically shouted back at her, “I hear you, Mom! I’m right here! I’m right here! I can hear you! Where are you? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, Tom, please!” Mom cried, almost hysterical now—and Mom never got hysterical, never. “Please answer me!”

Tom clutched at his own hair in frustration. “Mom, where are you? What’s wrong? Tell me where you are! I hear you!”

And then there was a sound that made Tom’s heart squeeze tight in his chest. That double beep.

He looked at the readout on the phone: Connection lost.

“No!”

Tom shouted out loud in his frustration. Quickly, he pressed the Redial button. The phone sang out its series of tones and then began ringing again. It rang twice… three times…

“Come on!” Tom willed his mother to answer.

Where was she?

In the middle of the fourth ring, the ring broke off.

“Mom?” Tom said eagerly.

“You’ve reached Ann Harding’s cell phone. Please leave a message after the tone.”

Her voice mail!

The tone sounded. Tom started talking rapidly, urgently. “Mom, it’s me. Listen. Where are you? I heard you before but you couldn’t hear me. Everything’s so bizarre here. Call me back as soon as you get this! Okay?”

He hung up. His unsteady hand slowly fell to his side.

What. Is. Going. On?

Has to be an explanation, he thought. Has to be, has to be, has to be. There always is.

But that horrible, horrible sound of his mother’s frantic crying came back to him and he realized: even if there was an explanation, it wasn’t going to be good.

Tom stood there, thinking, trying to figure out what to do next. His eyes moved slowly around the front hall. His gaze traveled over the large photo portrait that hung on the wall—right next to the hall closet so it was the first thing you saw when you came in. It was a photo of the three of them: Mom, Burt, and Tom. A blowup of the portrait they’d had taken for the church directory. Mom was sitting in a chair. Burt was behind her to the right, wearing his uniform. Tom was in a jacket and tie behind her to the left. Each of the brothers had one hand on Mom’s shoulder. Tom’s glance moved past the framed photo to the small wooden cross that hung beside it—then onto the sidelight beside the door, to the pane that held the gold star sticker that marked this as the home of a family that had lost someone in the war.

Tom gazed absently at the star for a minute—and then the focus of his gaze shifted and he looked through the glass to the outside.

The marine layer had thickened out there. The fog had crept in closer to the house. The whiteness hunkered and swirled over the edge of the grass. The end of the driveway was misted over, almost invisible.

Tom stared out, trying to think. He saw the fog shift a little.

Someone was standing there!

There was a woman standing in the street, standing in the mist, just at the very end of the driveway. The first human being he had seen all morning. She was a small woman, thirty or forty years old. Pale and thin. She was dressed in light colors—a white blouse, a tan skirt—so that she almost blended into the swirling white atmosphere. She didn’t move. She didn’t do anything. She just stood there, staring. Her face was expressionless—weirdly blank—almost completely empty of any feeling, as if she were sleepwalking or as if… as if she weren’t alive at all.

Moment after moment, she didn’t move. She just went on standing there, standing very still, her arms down by her sides. Standing and staring at the house. Staring straight at the sidelight. Staring straight at Tom.

Tom felt as if his heart had stopped beating. He gaped out at the woman, his phone forgotten in his hand. The woman didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change. But now the fog began to blow and roll across her. The swirling white mist began to thicken around her. It began to cover her over. She began to fade into it, her features becoming dim, her figure becoming more shadowy, harder to see. As Tom watched, dumbstruck, she began to disappear from view.

No! thought Tom.

He grabbed the door, pulled it open, and rushed outside.

4.

Tom felt the cold and damp of the day on his face as he broke from the house. He moved quickly to the driveway, quickly down the driveway toward the street where the woman in the white blouse was standing. Even as he hurried toward her, she seemed to fade away from him, to fade back into the swirling fog.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted, waving his hand.

But the woman didn’t answer him. With that same eerily dead look on her face, she slowly began to turn to one side.

“Hey!” Tom called, jogging faster down the driveway toward her. “Hey, hold on a second, would you?!”

No answer—and the woman started walking away.

Tom felt another sickening thrill of fear. Something was really wrong with this. Something about this woman was really wrong. The emptiness of her expression. The way she didn’t answer him, didn’t respond to his shouts at all. The slow, deliberate way in which she stepped now into the turning, moving mist.

Tom ran faster. As he neared the end of the drive, the fog began to close around him. He felt it, clammy on his face and his arms.

“Hold on!” he cried out to the woman again.

She seemed not to hear him. She took another step down the road, into the fog, away from him. Her figure grew dimmer as the whiteness closed over her. But then, suddenly, as Tom kept running toward her, she turned her head. She looked directly at him! The fog thinned for just a moment, and he got a good look at her face.

Tom gasped out loud. He had that feeling he got when an elevator went down too fast—as if he were falling but his stomach was staying in one place.

Because he knew her! He recognized her! He couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered her voice, all right. He had just heard her voice a little while ago.

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

It was the woman who had called him just this morning. The woman whose call had woken him from his dream. He remembered her insistent voice over the phone…

Please!

… her voice reaching out to him through that strange static, reaching out urgently as if from someplace very far away.

But what was her name? He knew it. Why couldn’t he remember?

“Wait, please!” he shouted.

But the woman only stared at him one instant more. Then she turned and walked into the fog and the fog gathered thickly around her. Tom had one last glimpse of her. Then she faded to a misty figure. Then the fog swallowed her, and she was gone.

Tom didn’t hesitate. He ran after her. He plunged after her into the fog.

A moment—a step—and the murk of white surrounded him. The slimy damp chilled his skin. The thick mist cut off his vision almost entirely. For another second or two as he ran, he could see the curb beside the Colliers’ lawn—then even that, barely a few yards away, disappeared under the churning marine layer.

All the same, at first, Tom didn’t think about it. All he thought about was catching up to the woman, finding out who she was, what she wanted. Over and above his fears, that pulse of curiosity—that need to get the answers—was pounding in him now. He was desperate just to talk to someone, just to ask some living person what on earth was going on.

He kept running. The woman had been moving so slowly, she couldn’t have gotten far away. Even stumbling blindly through the mist as he was, Tom was sure to catch up to her if he stayed on the road.

But he didn’t catch up to her. It was strange. More than strange. He ran for several more seconds, his sneakers slapping the macadam as he charged deeper and deeper into the ever-thickening mist. But there was no sign of her, no sign of anyone, no sign—he finally noticed—of anything at all.

He stopped, breathless. He stood, panting. He looked around him. Even in the cold damp of the fog, he felt himself begin to sweat.

He couldn’t see anything now—nothing but the fog. He turned around in a full circle. The white mist was so thick it erased every detail from sight. He could make out a few inches of pavement around his feet and that was it. Still, he insisted to himself, still—how could that woman have gotten away from him? How could she have vanished like that, walking so slowly when he was running so fast?

“Hello?” he shouted—really loudly this time. “Hello? Where’d you go? Where are you?”

He listened, and finally—finally!—a noise answered him: a shuffling footstep.

He spun round to face the sound. There she was!

He could see her figure in the mist, not far away, just a shadow of a shadow really. But now, instead of fading from him, she seemed to be getting closer, the outline of her growing darker, more distinct.

“I’m over here…,” he began to shout to her, but even as the words passed his lips, his voice faded away to nothing.

Because now he realized: it wasn’t her. That figure moving toward him. It wasn’t the woman in the white blouse at all. It was someone else.

It was something else.

Tom narrowed his eyes and strained to see through the murk. The figure came toward him slowly, slowly growing clearer with every step. He could tell it wasn’t the woman in the white blouse by the way it was moving. Instead of her slow but certain and steady pace, this figure had a sort of shambling limp. Its shoulders seemed hunched. Its arms hung and swung.

Tom almost called out again, but some instinct stopped him. He licked his lips. They were suddenly dry as dust.

He heard another sound and turned to his left. There was another figure moving toward him from where the Staffords’ hedges were supposed to be. Another shambling, limping shadow coming slowly toward him out of the fog.

And then another footstep to his right. And Tom turned and saw yet another shadow limping its way out of the mist from where the Colliers’ lawn must’ve been.

Whatever they were, they were all around him.

Tom began to feel as clammy inside as the fog on his skin. The fear that swirled up out of the core of him was, in fact, like an inner fog. It filled his brain. It clouded his mind. He remembered that moment earlier in the day when he had come down the drive to get the newspaper, when he had looked into the swirling mist and had the bizarre thought that something was moving in there, that something was coming slowly toward him, shuffling slowly toward him. And now it was true. The figure he saw in front of him right now—the figures he saw to his left and right—they were shuffling toward him: slowly, relentlessly, and with that strange, hobbled, inhuman gait.

For another second, his reporter’s curiosity pinned Tom to the spot.

What are they? What are they?

Then even his curiosity was overwhelmed by his terror—and he turned and ran.

5.

He ran without thinking. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried. He was in pure panic mode now and just had to get back into the safety of his house. Back where he could think, back where he could clear his brain and return to some semblance of common sense and reality. Because this wasn’t reality, this couldn’t be reality, this was like…

Like a zombie apocalypse!

Yes! That’s what it reminded him of exactly. Like one of those movies where the hero goes to sleep one night and wakes up to find that everyone on earth has died and come back as shambling, brain-eating, flesh-devouring monsters. And the fact that things like that didn’t happen in real life was not reassuring—not reassuring at all—because he was just too frightened in that moment to care. He was too frightened even to think about anything but getting out of that fog and fast.

So he ran. Back through the clammy, roiling cloud. Back toward his house—back toward where he hoped his house was, anyway. He looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw the three shambling figures still behind him, still visible, but fading somewhat as he outpaced them, as they clumped after him slowly and he ran away as fast as he could.

He faced forward, plunging blindly through the shifting white. And now a noise of fear escaped him. Up ahead of him, he saw yet another figure—no, two more figures—two more men or whatever they were shambling toward him slowly from the other end of the street. They were moving slant-wise, moving to cut him off from his own driveway, he thought, to intercept him before he could reach his house.

Tom changed course, cutting to his left, hoping against hope that his driveway really was where he thought it was. If he was right, he would beat the—the things—the creatures—whatever they were—he would beat them to the driveway and get to his house before they could get to him.

Through the cold, thickening, sickening clouds of panicked terror inside him, there suddenly came a laser-thin ray of hope. The fog was thinning. The edge of his driveway was dimly visible. He was heading in the right direction!

The shadows up ahead were still some distance away. The shadows behind him… He glanced back over his shoulder again. He could barely see them now. Yes! He was going to make it!

With new determination, he faced forward.

And one of the things was standing right beside him. It made an unholy sound and lunged at him out of the fog.

He hadn’t seen it there until that instant. He hadn’t noticed it creeping toward him from the right. Now, without warning, it was suddenly almost on top of him, mere yards away, its silhouette boldly clear behind the thinning curtain of mist. As Tom broke from the thickest depths of the fog into the clearer area at the bottom of his driveway, the thing let out that bizarre noise—a hollow, self-echoing shriek—and reached out to grab him.

Tom twisted his shoulder to avoid its grasp. A weirdly gnarled hand with long claws swept past him. For a single second, the creature’s face emerged from the fog.

Tom only caught a glimpse of it, but that one glimpse made the terror in him blaze like an icy fire. The thing was not what he feared. It was not some human being who had turned into a zombie. It was not a human being at all.

The face Tom saw—or thought he saw—it flashed by him too quickly for him to be certain—was the face of a beast unlike any he had ever seen before. Its skin was ash-gray, darkened by patches of sickly red. Its semihuman features were strangely elongated, as if its head had been stretched top to bottom. Strands of greasy hair were strung across its mottled pate. Its nose was like a pit. Its cheeks were deeply sunken. Its mouth gaped open, the sharp teeth gleaming within. It would have almost seemed the face of a dead and rotting thing except that the eyes were sparkling with an eager, living cruelty.

It made that noise again. That horrible, somehow hungry noise. As its swiping claws missed Tom’s shoulder, its hideous features came within inches of him. Tom cried out gruffly in disgust. Then the creature stumbled past him and staggered clumsily back into the depths of the fog, fading from sight.

The beast would surely turn around and try again, but Tom did not wait around to watch. He didn’t slow down at all. He just kept running. A few more steps and he broke out of the mist. He felt the damp grip of the stuff release him as his front yard and his house came into view not far ahead. He raced wildly up the driveway, his sneakers slapping the pavement. He had a sense that the creatures were still after him, that they were shambling toward him from every side. But he didn’t look, he didn’t dare. He just kept running.

A few more strides to his front door. He was there, his hand on the knob. Now he was pulling the door open. Now he hurled himself inside. Now, at last, he slammed and locked the door behind him.

Panting, gasping, heaving in each rasping breath, he peered out the sidelight to see if the beasts were going to come after him. But no. There was nothing there now, nothing visible, anyway. He could see the driveway clear down to the end. The mist was as it was before, thick all around the edges of the lawn, but hanging back from his house itself as if the house and front lawn were in some kind of protective bubble.

Tom had a momentary, terrifying thought. What if—while he was out there—what if some of those things had gotten inside the house? What if one of them was creeping down the hall behind him, reaching out for his neck right now?

He spun around and stared at his own home wide-eyed. He listened, straining with every particle of himself to hear anything, anything moving, approaching.

And a voice came to him from down the hall: “Tom? Tom? Are you there?”

Tom’s heart seized in his chest. The voice was coming from the kitchen.

“Tom?”

For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was too stunned to answer.

“Tom? Can you hear me?”

He knew that voice. Of course he did. He would know it anywhere.

“Tom?” she called to him again.

And with a wild rush of relief, Tom called back to her, “Marie!”

Was it only three weeks ago? It was. Tom had come out of his last class of the day—American History—and he knew at once that his life had changed forever. The latest issue of the Sentinel had come out. Lisa, the editor, had used her study period to put the dead-tree edition in the racks that stood at the hallway corners. Students were already standing around holding copies of the paper in their hands or reading the digital version on their tablets. Staring at the front page. Gaping at the story on the front page:

Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs. By Tom Harding

It was a shattering revelation. The Tiger team of three years ago—the team that had, against all odds and expectations, won the Open Division and claimed the state championship, the team that had made the school so proud—had cheated. Several of the linemen had illegally used anabolic steroids, the dangerous prescription drugs that made you bigger and stronger in the short term, even as they damaged your long-term health.

As Tom walked down the hall, the kids reading the paper looked up. They looked at him. Their faces darkened. They watched him pass with their eyes narrowed and their lips pressed together with rage. One guy—Mitchell Smith, a Tigers lineman—purposely slammed his shoulder into Tom’s shoulder as he walked by, making Tom grunt in pain and reel back a step. No one protested the attack. No one said a word.

It was plain to see: they hated him. Everyone in the whole school hated him for writing that story.

When Tom reached the newspaper office, Lisa was already at the editor’s desk. She was reading the angry comments about him that were piling up rapidly on the newspaper’s website.

“Tom Harding should be kicked out of school for telling lies about our heroes,” one comment read. “He’s just jealous because he’s never done anything to make us proud. He’s a moron and he’s disgraced our school.” Other comments weren’t quite so kind.

Tom dropped heavily into the chair behind his desk. He felt hollow inside. He’d had a lot of bad days these last few months, and this was shaping up to be one of the worst of them.

The Sentinel’s office was just a small room in the school’s basement, down the hall from the gym. It was cramped in there. Hardly any space at all between his desk and Lisa’s. The walls were papered with notices and notes and schedules and fragments of mock-up layouts pinned onto bulletin boards and taped onto the wall.

Lisa sat on her swivel chair, leaning forward to gaze into her monitor. She was a pug-nosed girl, with freckled cheeks and long, dark red hair. She wore glasses with black frames and small round lenses. Behind the lenses, her green eyes were smart and kind. She shook her head as yet another furious comment appeared on the site, and then another.

She glanced up at Tom with a look of sympathy. “They’ll get over it, Tom,” she said. “They can’t stay angry forever.” She did not sound very convincing, and Tom was not very convinced.

He tried to smile, but it didn’t come off. He had expected something like this—something—but not so much, so much rage against him, so much hatred. He knew that everyone in school loved the Tigers. But didn’t they understand? He loved the Tigers, too! Even before he’d reached high school, he’d been their biggest fan. He didn’t want to hurt them or soil their reputation. It was just… well, he was a reporter, and he had gotten hold of an important story. He had had no choice but to tell the truth, whether it went against his interests or not.

“People are like this, Tommy,” said Lisa gently. “They blame the messenger for bringing the bad news.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“Will you be all right?”

He glanced at her. This time he managed to get one corner of his mouth to turn up. “Sure,” he joked, “I never wanted to have any friends anyway.”

Lisa smiled. “You have one, at least,” she said.

Grateful, Tom was about to answer her when he sensed a new presence in the room and turned to the door. Instantly, he forgot whatever he’d been about to say to Lisa—he forgot Lisa entirely—and sat there silently, staring, openmouthed.

Marie—Marie Cameron—was standing in the doorway.

He had been in love with Marie since they were both in the third grade. She had been beautiful then, but she was wildly, glamorously beautiful now. Her blond hair poured down in ringlets framing her high cheeks, her button nose, and her Cupid’s-bow mouth. Her blue eyes shone and sparkled. Her figure was slender and lush by heart-stopping turns. Her smile was dazzling, a kind of silent music.

Tom did not know how many times he had dreamed about going out with her, putting his arm around her, kissing her. But Marie had always been with Gordon Thomas—the head cheerleader and the football quarterback, so perfect for each other they were a walking cliché.

All the same, even though Tom knew he had no chance with her, his heart sank to think that Marie would hate him now for what he’d written about the team. The Tigers’ drug use had taken place while Gordon was still in middle school—but it was Gordon’s team now, and he’d be furious to see it publicly shamed. Since Marie was Gordon’s girlfriend, Tom thought she would be furious, too.

She stepped toward him and Tom tensed, waiting for her to unleash her rage.

Instead, she lifted her hand—her small, white, perfect hand—and said, “Hey, Tom, I was hoping I’d find you here. Do you think you could give me a lift home?”

For a moment, he could only sit there, could only go on gaping at her silently like some kind of nutcase.

Then he leapt out of his chair so fast he nearly knocked it over.

He drove Marie home in the old yellow Mustang Burt had left behind when he went overseas. He wished he had cleaned out the ancient papers and fast-food bags lying all over the floor in the backseat, but whenever he was working on a story, he got so involved he forgot to do stuff like that. He must’ve apologized to Marie for the mess about a hundred times—and every time he turned to say the words to her, he was amazed to see her sitting there, real as life but far more beautiful, in his very own passenger seat.

They drove up into the hills, the Pacific Ocean falling away below them, the water gleaming under the afternoon sun.

Marie waved off his apologies. She said she didn’t care about the messy car. Then she said: “I want you to know, I really admire what you did, Tom. Writing that story.”

“Really? I thought you’d be ticked off like everyone else…”

“I’m not at all. I think it’s brave to tell the truth like that. Not caring what anyone thinks of you. It’s really brave.”

Tom didn’t answer. He didn’t even glance at her—he didn’t want her to see the look on his face. To have Marie tell him he was brave—it made up for all the nasty looks in the hall, all the nasty comments online, all of it.

“But what about Gordon?” he asked her. The words came out of his mouth as the thought came into his mind. “I mean, I know he didn’t do anything wrong, but… it’s his team. Isn’t he angry at me, too?”

But Marie shrugged again. “I don’t know how he feels. We haven’t talked about it,” she said.

The answer surprised him. It was almost as if she didn’t care what Gordon thought. Tom didn’t really want to question this, but it made him so curious he couldn’t help himself. He had to ask: “Speaking of Gordon, how come he couldn’t drive you home? Wasn’t he around?”

“He’s around,” Marie said offhandedly. “But I wanted you to drive me, that’s all. I feel like I don’t get to see you enough.”

This time Tom was so surprised he couldn’t help but look over at her. She smiled. And what a sight that was. Amazing.

He stopped the Mustang in front of her house. It was a sprawling two-story mansion with white curving balconies overlooking the ocean. Really a massive palace of a place. Marie’s father, Dr. Cameron, was one of the most important guys in town—and obviously one of the richest, too. He was always in the newspaper, serving on this board or that, or showing up at some big party for some big charity or other.

And there he was now, in fact, just stepping out of the black Mercedes parked in the driveway. He looked up and smiled at Tom and Marie and gave them a friendly wave. Marie waved back.

Then she turned to Tom. “I meant what I said,” she told him. “I admire what you did. And I hope we can see each other more from now on.”

Somehow Tom managed to hide the thrill he felt. He managed to sound almost cool and calm as he answered, “I would like that. I would like it a lot.”

Marie gave him another smile—this one so brilliant it may have actually been illegal. “Good,” she said. “Then we have a plan.”

Tom watched her get out of the car. He watched her walk up the drive to join her father by the front door. He watched her turn and twinkle a final wave at him over her shoulder.

Amazing, he thought to himself. It was the only word he could come up with, and he thought it again and again: Amazing.

6.

“Marie!” he cried out now.

Wild-eyed, he hurried down the hall to her, the images of the shambling monsters out in the fog still filling his brain.

As he stepped into the kitchen, Marie leapt up from her chair at the round table in the breakfast nook. She rushed into his arms and he held her, his cheek against her golden hair.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she whispered into his chest.

Tom let his fear and panic melt into the warm press of her and the sweetness of her perfume. He closed his eyes for a moment, in relief and pleasure. When he opened them, he looked over Marie’s head. Behind the table in the nook, the windows showed the backyard. Everything looked strangely normal out there. The mist was not as thick as it was out front. It obscured the sun, but Tom could still see the backyard grass and the hedges that bordered the Laughlins’ property behind them. Most important, there were no semihuman shapes visible, no threatening figures shuffling and limping toward the house.

He held Marie away from him so he could look down into her face. “What about you?” he said. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, her crystal eyes glistening. “I’ve been so scared, though. So scared.”

“Then you saw them? Those—those things in the fog. I’m not imagining them. You saw them, too.”

Marie turned away from him. She put her hand to her face, rubbed her eyes wearily. “I don’t know what I saw. I was so terrified. I just ran. I just ran to get here, to find you.”

Even in his fear and confusion, the words filled Tom’s heart. Now, at least, he had a job to do: protect Marie. Keep her safe. Even if nothing else made sense, there was a mission that could guide his actions.

“I think we should get in my car,” he said. “Get out of here. They could attack the house any minute.”

Marie turned back to him and shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they can leave the fog. I think we’re safe in here for now. Safer than we’d be outside, anyway.”

Tom thought about it. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked her. “Is it happening all over? I haven’t seen anyone else. No one human, anyway.”

Marie turned back to him and shook her head. The tears still shone in her eyes. “I’m not sure…”

“I called my mom. I reached her, but she couldn’t hear me.”

“I know. I talked to my father,” said Marie. “We didn’t have a good connection, but I could make out some of what he was saying. He was the one who sent me here. He said you were the only person who could help us.”

“Me? I don’t even know what’s going on. Those monsters out there—it’s like—it’s like we’re in a zombie apocalypse.”

Marie gave a weak laugh. “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

Tom himself managed a small laugh at the idea. “Right. Probably not.”

He suddenly felt exhausted. He moved to one of the chairs by the round table and sank down into it. He stared out the window without really seeing anything. He was thinking about that thing—that thing with the hideous face—its claws snatching at him from the fog, nearly grabbing him before he even saw it.

What was it?

He shook his head. “You know what it is like, though?” he said softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself, working it out in his mind. “It’s like one of those movies or TV shows where strange things keep happening and after a while, you start to realize that none of it is real. You know? It’s too weird. It can’t be real. It has to be a dream or something. Or maybe the lead character is really dead or he’s gone crazy or somebody slipped him some kind of drug and he’s having a hallucination. You know what I mean? You think that’s what this is: a dream or a hallucination? Or do you think we’re actually dead?”

He glanced over at her. He took comfort from the warmth and sympathy in her gaze. She stepped forward and put her hand gently on his shoulder. “I’m pretty sure we’re not dead,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

He nodded slowly. “But then what?” he said. “What’s happening, Marie? There has to be a reasonable explanation. Doesn’t there?”

Marie now sat down in the chair in front of him. She took his two hands in her hands. He found her cool touch soothing. They sat facing each other. He looked deep into her eyes. Even now—still haunted by the memory of those creatures ranging through the fog—by that clawed hand reaching for him—by that deformed and hideous face looming in front of him—even now, the sight of Marie, the sweet beauty of her, made his heart swell. He could not remember a time when he hadn’t longed to be with her.

“Do you remember the monastery in the woods?” she asked him.

The question was so unexpected, so odd, that it was a moment before he could take it in, a moment before he could answer. “Sure,” he said uncertainly. “The Catholic one. The retreat. The one that burned down. St. Mary or something…”

“Santa Maria,” said Marie.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

The Santa Maria Monastery Retreat had been a compound of Spanish-style buildings set around a pretty chapel deep in the forest up on Cold Water Mountain. It was gone now. The so-called Independence Fire that had scorched the hills last July—that had consumed acres and acres of woods up there and destroyed more than a hundred houses—had reduced Santa Maria’s stately buildings, valuable antiques, and tranquil gardens to charred ruins.

“What about it?” said Tom. “What’s the monastery got to do with anything?”

“My father says you have to go up there. He says that’s where the answers are and where you’re supposed to be right now. He says if you can get to Santa Maria, you can bring all this craziness to an end.”

Tom stared at her. “But why?” he said. It made no sense. Tom would do just about anything to get answers, to find out the truth about all this, but… go back outside? Out into the fog where those—those things were? And up into the woods on Cold Water Mountain? To the ruins of the monastery? “How can that possibly help?”

Holding his hands firmly in hers, Marie shook her head. “I’m not sure. Like I said, our connection wasn’t that good. But Daddy said it was important. Urgent, even. He said once you get to the monastery, you’ll know what you have to do to bring this to an end.”

As Tom went on staring at her, thoughts raced through his mind. Why the monastery? Why the mountain? He was trying to make sense of it. Was it possible that what was happening here was some sort of supernatural, spiritual event? Were those creatures in the fog some kind of demons? Did he have to get up to Santa Maria to call on the power of God to fight them or to call on the angels or something? But why the monastery? And why him? His family had always gone to Hope Church around the corner. It was nondenominational. They weren’t even Catholic!

“I don’t get it,” he was about to say—but before he could, his phone rang in his pocket. The guitar riff: “The Fightin’ Side of Me.”

Tom tried to reach for the phone, but Marie gripped his hands even tighter. He saw her eyes flash to his pocket, to the place where the phone was singing.

“Don’t answer that!” she said, her voice a frightened whisper.

Confused, he worked one hand free. “What do you mean? I have to answer it. It might be my mom.”

He reached into his pocket. He felt the phone vibrating there.

Marie looked at him urgently. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s not your mom. I know it! Don’t answer, Tom. I mean it. Just do what Daddy said. Just get to the woods, get to the monastery. That’s where the answers are! That’s what you want, isn’t it? Answers. That’s what you’re always…”

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.

7.

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.

Then, most horrifying of all, a doctor, his face obscured behind a surgical mask, stepped forward and set a scalpel against his skin—Tom’s skin. They were going to cut him open on television right before his own eyes. Tom—standing there in the family room, staring at the TV—could almost feel the cold touch of the blade against him.

But all at once the scene went blank. The television turned itself off.

The sudden darkness on the screen snapped Tom’s trance. He shook himself as if he were waking up. Without thinking, he turned and found the remote on one of the chairs, lifted it, pointed it at the TV, and tried to turn the show on again. The prospect of watching himself cut open made him sick to his stomach, but he had to know what happened next, had to find out what all this meant.

Training his intense blue eyes on the TV screen by sheer force of will, he pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. Pressed it again—nothing. He tossed the remote back down onto the chair.

Think, he told himself. Figure it out. Finding answers is what you do. Find them!

But how could he? His own image on the TV. Burt calling him by name. Marie urging him to the burned-out retreat in the woods. Monsters in the fog. How could he put any of it together? How could he make sense out of any of it?

Marie, he thought. She—or her father—was the only one who seemed to know anything. He had to get back to her, find out more. Why did he have to go to the monastery? She must know. She must know something she wasn’t telling him.

He raced back to the stairs, back up the stairs. He reached the top and pushed through the door into the kitchen. He stopped short on the threshold, staring.

Marie was gone.

The breakfast nook was empty. The kitchen was empty. Other than that, everything seemed to be exactly as he had left it. The chairs were in disarray. The one chair Marie had knocked over was still lying on the floor. Tom could even still smell a trace of Marie’s perfume lingering in the air. It was as if she’d only just now left the room.

“Marie?” he called out. “Marie!”

But there was no answer, and once again the house had that feeling of complete emptiness.

He stepped to the hallway and called again.

“Marie!”

But the hall was empty. He knew she was gone.

Tom felt the bizarre events of the day spinning through his mind, ideas spinning through his mind as if they were trying to put themselves into the right order, looking for the pattern in which they fit together.

It’s not a dream, Marie had told him. It’s not a hallucination. You’re not dead. You’re not mad. Go to the monastery. That’s where the answers are.

What did she know? What was it she wasn’t saying?

His thoughts whirling, he turned back to the kitchen. And as he turned, his thoughts stopped.

Something was off. Different. His eyes went over the empty room. He had been wrong before. He had thought the kitchen was just the way he’d left it. But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Something had changed. But what? What was it?

He couldn’t tell. He stood still, looking the place over. There was the table, as before. The chairs in their skewed positions, the one fallen over. The sink, the cupboards, the door across the way that led into the dining room, the stove on the opposite wall—everything familiar, everything unchanged, a scene so normal that it made Tom ache for all the ordinary mornings when he would wake up and come downstairs to find his mom in here, making breakfast.

But something was definitely different. What was it?

His searching glance went from corner to corner. The cabinets, the basement door… back around to the table again, sitting empty there in the breakfast nook with the window behind it…

He stopped. That was it. The window.

The fog.

When he had come in here before, when he had first found Marie sitting at the table, he remembered he could see the backyard outside. There was mist out there, but it was thin. The scene was much clearer than it was out on the street, where the marine layer was so thick you could barely see a few feet in front of you.

Now, though, that had all changed. The fog had come in dense and close. It was pressed hard against the windowpanes. The glass was white, completely misted over, dripping with moisture. The backyard was now totally invisible.

Tom moved toward the window slowly. Fear and curiosity were warring within him—and the fear was winning. Up until now, he’d had the feeling that the house was somehow protected, somehow surrounded by a sort of safety zone that kept the fog—and the monsters in the fog—at bay.

But he saw now it wasn’t so. The fog was right up against the house, a wall of white, impenetrable.

Did that mean the monsters were also close?

Frightened as he was, he had to find out—had to. He moved toward the breakfast nook. He edged around the table. He leaned in to the window, pressed his forehead against the cool glass, trying to peer out.

He could see nothing. Stillness. Fog, thick and swirling. Or wait… Was something there? Did something just move? Tom squinted, peering harder. Tendrils of fog turned and curled and the whiteness seemed to thin a little. The view began to clear.

A creature was staring back at him through the window, its sharp teeth bared, its cruel eyes gleaming.

Tom had only a second to react—only a second to step backward.

Then the window exploded as the creature lunged at him through the shattering glass.

8.

The creature burst through the window with an echoing screech that obliterated thought. It was a screech of ungodly hunger. It twisted the monster’s already hideous features into a fanged, snarling portrait of pure brutality.

Tom stumbled backward in terror, his arms pinwheeling. His side banged painfully into the edge of the breakfast table. The jolt knocked him off-balance and he went down on one knee, grabbing hold of one of the chairs to break his fall. The creature—half inside the house and half out—strained and reached for him and screamed again, trying to clamber the rest of the way through the window to get at him. Tom saw the wicked, razor-sharp claws on its fingers stretched out toward him, inches away from his face.

Holding on to the chair, Tom quickly dragged himself to his feet. For a second, the monster withdrew its reaching hands and grabbed hold of the windowsill in order to propel itself inside. Completely ignoring the shards of glass that lanced into the flesh of its palms and arms, the beast started to climb in.

Tom lifted the chair with both hands. He brought it back over his shoulder. Swung it as hard as he could at the monster’s face.

One of the chair legs connected with the beast’s head. The thing gave an ugly grunt and tumbled backward out of the house, vanishing into the fog again.

But the fog was pouring into the kitchen like smoke. Tom knew it would be only moments before the monster tried to come in again.

And now he heard the sound of shattering glass in the living room.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

They were breaking in everywhere.

He dropped the chair. He rushed across the kitchen to the far door. He looked through—through the dining room—into the living room at the front of the house.

He thought he had been afraid before. He thought he had been afraid out in the fog when the creature had attacked him. That was nothing compared to this. Now the fear was like a raging fire inside him. It nearly burned his will away. It nearly left him weak and helpless.

Three of the things were crawling, clawing, climbing into the house. They had smashed the living room windows—the windows that ran all across the front wall—they had smashed all of them, and the fog was pouring through the openings. Second by second, the room was filling with white, swirling mist and the three creatures were coming in with it. They were scrabbling over the jagged shards of glass and tumbling through. One landed on the sofa, two fell to the floor. They all climbed slowly and clumsily to their feet. They looked around them with gleaming eyes.

They were searching—searching for Tom.

Tom ran right toward them. It cost him every ounce of courage he had, but he ran right through the dining room, right past the dining room table and into the living room, right at the beasts. It was the fastest way to get back to the front stairs—and the stairs were the only hope of survival he had. The kitchen was filling with fog behind him. The living room was growing misty in front of him. If he stayed where he was, the creatures would come crashing in through every window till the house was full of them and he would have nowhere to make a stand. Upstairs, at least he had a chance.

The hunched, grunting creatures spotted him at once as he raced toward them. They came to attention like hunting dogs when they get the scent of game. For a second, they went rigid, their horribly distorted faces twisting, their sunken nostrils flaring. Then they let out a hollow shriek of triumph—and they charged.

They moved slowly with their slumped, lumbering, limping gaits. Tom was already racing past them and heading for the front hall as they made their move. The monster closest to him reached out, and Tom felt the tip of one of its claws brush his arm. He dodged out of its way. The terror of the near miss gave him fresh agility and speed. He was past the thing before it could try again to grab him.

There was the front door now, the front hall, the stairs. He’d almost made it. He rushed through the connecting doorway, out of the living room, into the foyer. He began to reach for the newel-post to pull himself up the steps.

But as he did, the sidelight next to the front door burst. A clawed hand shot in and grabbed hold of him.

Tom saw the furred fingers close around his wrist. He felt the long claws slashing his flesh. He saw the pocked, elongated, skull-like face of the thing pressing through the hole in the sidelight. He saw the monster’s eyes gleaming with cruelty and anticipation as it gripped him and began to pull him toward itself. Tom thought his heart would stop with sheer horror.

He tried to yank himself free, but the beast was strong—and worse than that: the creature’s touch was somehow poisonous. The minute its hand wrapped around him, the minute its claws slashed him, Tom felt a swirling darkness enter his mind. He felt himself losing strength.

The beast held him fast, trying to pull him toward the sidelight. The fog poured in around him and his mind grew foggy, too. With every second, Tom felt himself becoming weaker. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the monsters in the living room humping toward him. He heard them grunting and gasping. He saw their eyes gleaming, their teeth bared.

The monster at the sidelight continued to hold him and the fog swirled around him and the dark poison swirled through his brain. Tom wasn’t even sure he wanted to fight anymore. So what if they got him? What was the worst thing that could happen, anyway? At least if they killed him, it would put an end to this day of horror and confusion…

His will was seeping away.

The beast leaning in through the window gibbered wildly and kept trying to pull the weakening Tom toward him. Tom’s legs went wobbly. His eyes rolled in his head as he began to lose consciousness. He saw the portrait on the wall, tilting and spinning. His mom. His brother. He saw the cross hanging beside it.

“Fight them! Fight them off! Despair is never an option!”

Tom shook his head, trying to clear it. Was that Burt?

“Don’t give them even half a chance. Remember the Warrior…”

It was! It was Burt! On the television set again. His voice dim, far away but still shouting up to him from the basement.

“Don’t give in! That’s just the poison talking! Come on! You’re my brother! You do not surrender! The Warrior, Tom!”

A surge of strength went through him. Tom gave a roar and pulled himself free of the monster’s grasp, ignoring the claws that sliced his arm.

At once the poison seemed to leave his body, the darkness seemed to drain out of his mind. Light and alertness flooded through him and he was fully awake again.

With the new energy surging through his muscles, he started moving. Just as the monsters clumped out of the living room into the front hall, just as they began to close in on him, he shot up the stairs as fast as he could go.

He took the stairs two and three at a time. He broke free of the fog. It fell away behind him. The shuffling, limping monsters clustered on the stairs beneath him, bumping into the walls, bumping into one another, unable to rise above the level of the mist.

Tom was at the second-floor landing—was racing down the hall toward his room. Another moment and he was through his bedroom door. He slammed it shut. Locked it. Seized hold of the dresser with both hands. Dragged it across the floor and shoved it against the door, barricading himself inside.

He was safe—for now.

9.

Panting hard, Tom leaned against the dresser. His forearm stung from where the creature’s claws had dug into him. There was blood soaking into his sweatshirt sleeve. The fear inside him was so powerful it was sickening. For a moment, he thought he was actually going to throw up. But he remembered his brother’s voice shouting to him from the basement.

Fight them! Fight them off! Despair is never an option!

Shouting to him, calling him by name, as if it weren’t just Burt on a video but the real Burt, really there, still alive.

Remember the Warrior, Tom!

Tom didn’t know how it was possible for his brother to reach out to him from the grave like that. But right this minute, with everything so crazy, he didn’t care. Nothing made sense now, so he might as well cling to the sound of that familiar voice he missed so much. He fought off the fear and the sickness. He gritted his teeth, and his mouth twisted as a low growl of determination came out of him.

He had to do something. Now. The beasts were still out there. The fog was rising. They would rise with it, come up the stairs, down the hall. They’d be at the door soon, any second. He had to find a way out of here. Find a way to get help.

Tom looked around at his bedroom for something he could use: the computer on the desk, the window by the bed, the sports pennants on the wall, the framed newspaper pages…

“Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs.”

Something flashed through his mind. Some fragment of memory. Why couldn’t he grasp it? He had to think…

Go to the monastery, Tom. That’s where the answers are.

For a moment, Tom felt as if everything were on the verge of making sense…

Then the creatures reached his bedroom, and all his thoughts were scattered.

The first thud was soft, as if one of the beasts had stumbled coming down the hallway and fallen against the door. The noise was so faint Tom might have pretended to himself he hadn’t really heard it.

But then the thing started mewling. That high-pitched, weirdly echoing sound was unmistakable. Tom took an involuntary step back as a fresh wave of fear went over him. He stared at the door.

The doorknob began to turn.

Tom heard the clicking of long claws against the metal. The knob turned tentatively at first. Once this way, once that. Then again. Then it clicked back and forth harder—back and forth. Then the knob began to rattle as the creature grew frustrated. The door began to shiver on its hinges…

Tom gasped as the door leapt in its frame. One of the things started pounding on the wood, slamming the wood—it sounded like with its open hand—again and again. Then it stopped. But the next noise went up Tom’s spine and made his teeth ache. Scratching. Long claws were digging into the surface of the door, trying to rip their way through. Then there was more pounding—steady pounding now. Tom heard grunts, gasps, small animal shrieks out in the hall. How many of them were out there? He couldn’t tell.

The snarling got louder. The pounding on the door got more insistent. The dresser that barricaded the door began to shiver.

Eyes wide, Tom turned this way and that, looking for some way out. The window…

He crossed the room to the window. Peered outside.

His bedroom looked out on the backyard. He could see the fog lying over the small square of grass. At first he couldn’t make out much more than the ruffled whiteness. It was like staring down into clouds from an airplane.

But then he saw them.

There must have been nearly a dozen of them out there, dim hulking shadows ranging back and forth through the mist. Some were climbing into the house through the broken windows. Others were moving in slow, stumbling circles right below him, as if they were waiting for him to try to climb out and escape.

The pounding on the door continued behind him. And the growls and snorts and shrieks out in the hall continued, too. Grimly, Tom looked over his shoulder and saw the door rattling and the dresser trembling. The barricade couldn’t hold forever. The creatures were going to come bursting in, and soon.

Tom prayed for help as he scrabbled in his pocket for his cell phone. Please, God, help me, help me…

He fished his phone out. His hands trembling, he quickly called up the number pad and keyed in 911. He raised the phone to his ear. Waited. But there was nothing. There was no sound. Quickly, he lowered the phone. Looked desperately at the readout. He felt his stomach go sour again as one of the creatures out in the hall gave a loud echoing cry and hit the bedroom door full force.

No bars on the phone. No reception.

He quickly stuffed the phone back in his pocket. He went to the computer on the desk. His fingers were so unsteady, he had to try three times before he could call up his browser. Maybe he could raise a friend, or contact the police by FaceTime or Skype or even e-mail. Something. Anything. He had to reach anyone he could.

He waited for the browser page to load. What was taking so long? A monster in the hallway let out another soul-withering shriek and crashed into the door so hard Tom thought the wood would splinter and the door would fly off its hinges.

“Come on! Please!” he whispered at the computer.

But the only answer was the words that now appeared on the laptop’s screen: Connection timed out. He didn’t even bother to try again. He knew the Internet was down.

He was trapped—trapped in here. Trapped in his room. With the creatures gathered out in the hall, trying to break in. With more of them on the ground outside, circling beneath his window in the mist.

There was no escape.

The monsters in the hallway roared and pounded on the door. What could he do? What could he do?

Remember the Warrior…

The Warrior!

All at once, Tom did remember—and the memory was like a little flame inside him. The Warrior. Of course.

He stepped to his closet. He reached into the dark at the back. He touched the cool metal of his aluminum baseball bat. He didn’t play much anymore, but he’d never let his mom give the bat away. He brought it out. Read the label. A Louisville Slugger Warrior. Burt had given it to him for his birthday one year—Tom couldn’t remember which year, which birthday it was. It was a good one, though. Burt had taken him out to the park the next day. He had pitched to him and given him tips on how to swing, how to play the game.

Was this what Burt was trying to get him to remember?

Well, he had it now. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but somehow just the feel of it in his hand gave him courage. The creatures might break down the door, but the doorway was narrow. They could only come through one at a time, two at most. Maybe he could use the bat to fight them off, keep them at bay—for a while, anyway—who knew how long he could hold them? Even if they broke through eventually—even if they killed him—he’d at least have the satisfaction of de-braining some of them on his way out. A little payback for all this terror.

He returned with the bat to the bedroom door, posted himself in front of the dresser barricade. He gripped the handle of the bat in one hand—the bloody hand the monster had grabbed. He cradled the barrel in the other. He tried to ready himself.

The door continued to jump in its frame. The beasts continued to make those awful noises out in the hall. Tom’s heart beat so hard, so loudly, the pulse of it filled his head. He waited. He waited for the door to give way, waited for the beasts to start coming through, waited, as the seconds ticked off one by one, for the final battle to begin.

Then, with shocking suddenness, the noises stopped. All of them. The pounding. The snarling and growling and shrieking in the hall. The rattle of the shivering dresser. All the noises stopped altogether. Only the thudding of Tom’s heart continued, filling his mind as he went on staring at the door, as he went on gripping the bat in his sweating hands.

Come on, he thought. I’m ready for you!

But there was only silence. Silence and suspense—suspense worse than the terror.

Then—so surprising—so frightening it went through Tom’s body like an electric shock—a man spoke from behind him, from right inside the room.

“Tom,” he said quietly.

10.

Tom spun around so fast he nearly lost his balance. The voice seemed to have been coming from his desk. But there was no one there.

Yet as Tom stared at the empty desk chair, the man spoke again: “Listen to me, Tom.”

The voice was coming from the computer. The monitor had gone dark now. But Tom saw something flicker in that darkness. A faint, failing light. A suggestion of static. And a figure—yes—a silhouette, barely visible.

“Everything will be all right,” the figure said. “If you just do what I tell you to do.”

The man had a deep voice—deep and mellow. Even in that shocking moment, it had a warm, calm tone that Tom found somehow reassuring.

“The creatures are gone now,” said the figure quietly. “You’re safe—for the moment, anyway.”

“Who are you?” Tom said—he could barely muster a whisper.

“I’m your friend,” said the dim silhouette. It could hear him! It could answer him. “I’m here to help you through this situation.”

Tom took one quick glance at the door. It was still quiet out there. No more pounding. No more scratching or screaming. He turned back to face the computer. He dared to take a step toward it.

“What do you mean?” he said. “How can you help me? What can you do?”

The monitor flickered. For a moment, the man’s silhouette was almost distinct. Tom thought he saw the faint glow of the man’s eyes, watching him. The eyes made him feel cold. Goose bumps rose on his arms.

“You already see what I can do,” the man responded quietly. “The hall is empty, isn’t it? Go out there. Look out the window. The malevolents are gone.”

“Malevolents?”

“Yes, it means—”

“I know what malevolent means,” said Tom. “Evil.”

“Evil. Yes,” said the man calmly. “And they’re gone, aren’t they?”

Tom returned to the window, looked out. The fog was still thick out there, but the things he had seen moving in the depths of the whiteness were no longer visible. He nodded uncertainly, moving back to his post at the door. “Yeah. I guess. They seem to be gone. I don’t see them at least, or hear them.”

“They’re gone. Believe me. I’ve sent them away.”

“You did,” said Tom. “You can do that? You can control them?”

“I can. For a time.”

A rumble of thunder sounded outside. Tom glanced at the window just as a heavy rain started to fall. The drops pattered hard against the pane, streaking the glass as they rolled down. Tom faced the computer on the desk. There was a flash of lightning. The flash brightened the whole room for a shuddering second—and weirdly, it seemed to light up the depths of the computer screen as well. For that one instant, Tom seemed to see the man on the screen more clearly: a lean, dark, handsome face; high cheekbones; a thin smile; bright eyes, full of sharp intelligence. There was nothing particularly wrong-looking about him. Yet another chill went through Tom at the sight of him. The feeling was quickly gone and Tom pretended to himself he’d never felt it. The thing was: he needed help—badly—and the man in the computer was the only help on hand. He couldn’t afford to distrust him.

“Who are you?” Tom said.

“I told you: I’m your friend. My name doesn’t matter.”

“Well, how can you control those things? The malevolents? How did you make them go away?”

“It doesn’t matter how.”

“It matters to me. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, you hate that, don’t you? When things don’t make sense. You always want to figure them out. But you know, just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it can’t be understood.”

Tom had to acknowledge the truth of that. He didn’t really understand calculus either, but he assumed it made sense to somebody.

“Do you know why they’re here? These malevolents,” he asked now. “Do you know how they got here?”

“I know,” said the man quietly.

“Well, tell me!” Tom nearly cried out. “What’s going on? Please!”

The man gave a low hum of sympathy. He said, “Yes. You want answers. That’s your nature. You don’t like lies. You don’t like secrets. You never met a mystery you didn’t want to solve.”

“So help me, then,” said Tom.

“I’m trying, Tom. But some mysteries are very deep. Why is there evil at all, for instance? Why did Burt have to die? What’s happening to you now? If you want the solutions to puzzles like those, you have to go the extra mile.”

Tom shook his head, trying to work through his confusion. “What’s it got to do with Burt? And what extra mile? What do you mean? What do I have to do to find out what’s happening?”

“You have to do what Marie told you to do,” said the man in his gentle, almost hypnotizing tone. “You have to go to the monastery. The answers are there.”

“The monastery…” Tom gripped the baseball bat harder in his frustration. “Look, if you know so much, how about you just tell me the answers?”

“Because that’s not the way it works,” said the man gently. “You have to find the answers yourself. You have to face them yourself. The truth is not always easy, Tom. Sometimes it’s even horrific. It’s not enough to be told. You have to grasp it with your whole mind. You have to accept it with your whole heart. No one can do that for you.”

Tom gave another hesitant nod. He had to acknowledge this, too. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

“It is true. You know it is.”

Lightning flickered at the window again and Tom turned to watch it. He kept watching until the lightning was gone and the low growl of thunder followed. He didn’t admit it to himself, but the truth was he didn’t want to see the computer screen light up again. He didn’t want to see the man’s face again so clearly. Something about the dude creeped him out.

The lightning faded. Tom looked at the computer. It was dark. Silent.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

The man’s voice answered from the speaker, reassuringly calm and mellow. “Go to the monastery. The path is clear for now, but you have to hurry. I can’t keep the beasts away forever.”

Tom tried one more time to get something out of this guy. “At least tell me what I’m looking for. Tell me where my mom is. Is she all right?”

“The monastery, Tom,” said the man quietly. “All the answers are at the monastery.”

Tom cast a wary glance at the door. “And if I go out, I’ll be safe? The monsters are gone? I can get where I’m going?”

“The monsters are gone. Everything will be fine,” said the man. “It’s perfectly safe for you now.”

Tom kept eyeing the door. He turned his body to face it, still holding the Louisville Slugger in his two hands.

“Go on,” said the man. “Go back to the monastery.”

Tom glanced at him. “What do you mean, ‘back’?”

“Just go,” the man insisted. “Time is running out. You’ll see. It will be all right.”

The thunder rolled outside again. Tom let the head of the bat slip from his fingers. He lowered the barrel to the floor, still holding on to the handle. He felt deep misgivings about this—and about the man. Who was he? Why wouldn’t he tell him his name? Why did the sight of him make Tom feel afraid? And yet, what choice did he have but to trust him, to do what he said? He couldn’t fight the creatures off forever. Maybe the answers really were at the monastery. Marie said so. Why would she lie?

“That’s right,” said the man on the computer soothingly, as if he were reading Tom’s thoughts, answering his silent questions. “That’s right. You want this to be over, don’t you? You want the answers. I know you do.”

He so did! He wanted to solve this puzzle and end this nightmare. He wanted that as much as he’d ever wanted anything in his life. This was like being trapped inside a horror movie. He needed to get out.

He made up his mind. He leaned the Warrior against the wall. He took hold of the dresser. With a grunt of effort, he shoved it back across the floor, removing the blockade from the doorway.

“That’s right. Just have courage,” said the man in the computer. “Isn’t that what your brother would’ve told you? Have courage.”

Tom thought he heard a faint tone of mockery in the man’s voice, but he told himself he must be mistaken. He picked up the bat again. He reached out slowly. He unlocked the door. He opened it.

The hall was in shadow. There was a faint mist trailing across the doorway. But there were no monsters—not as far as he could see, at any rate.

Slowly, cautiously, he stepped over the threshold, leaving the bedroom behind him. He stepped out into the hall and stood in the darkness.

Just then there was another lightning flash. The silver-white light shot through the hall—and Tom saw the creatures. The malevolents were waiting for him, a crowd of them in the darkness to his right and his left. Drool was dripping from their eager mouths. Their eyes were bright with hunger.

The man had lied to him—but then Tom had already known that, hadn’t he? Deep down, he had known the man was lying all along. He had been so desperate to believe him he had pushed down the knowledge, but it was always there. Now he saw the truth—but it was too late.

The thunder crashed and the beasts rushed at him, swarmed over him, their claws tearing at him, their teeth ripping into his flesh.

The last thing Tom heard in his agony was the voice of the man on the computer. The man was laughing.