Nightmare City

11.

Tom cried out in pain and terror—and he opened his eyes.

Immediately, relief flooded through him. The nightmare was over. The monsters were gone.

He was in heaven again, just as before.

Just as before, he was standing on the brink of the vast and peaceful parkland with its stunningly green grass and its blindingly white Greek temples. The sky was a cloudless blue again. The light was golden, and the flower beds planted here and there were more colorful than any he had ever seen.

He looked around him in wonder. What a beautiful place it was! It was as if he had dreamed about it and now he had come here for real. Those monsters in the hallway—the malevolents—they must have killed him. He must be dead now—dead and gone to heaven. That was the only way he could make sense of it.

Some things were different here this time, he noticed. There weren’t as many people as there had been before. There were only a few now, a few men and women standing here and there. He particularly noticed this one guy again—the lanky young guy with long dirty blond hair. He was exactly where he’d been the last time. He hadn’t moved from his spot in front of one of the temples. His thin, hungry face with its sunken cheeks and darkly ringed eyes was still turning this way and that nervously, as if he were lost and wanted to ask directions but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

Whatever, Tom thought. The important thing, after being trapped in that horror movie of a house, was how beautiful this place was, how peaceful. No fog. No bizarre voices. No monsters. Maybe the Lying Man in the computer wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe the lie he had told to coax Tom out of his room had been well-intentioned. Sure, there had been moments of terror and agony when he’d stepped out into that hall and the malevolents attacked him. But now he was here. In this peaceful place. So maybe the man in the computer was right to lie. Maybe things were going to be okay after all.

Tom took a hesitant step forward. A wonderful thought had come into his mind. It was the same thought that had come to him last time, just before the phone had rung and brought him back to his bedroom. He thought: If this is heaven, then Burt must be here. He would be able to see Burt. He would be able to talk to Burt again. Burt would know what was going on. Burt would have the answers.

What would Tom give—what wouldn’t he give—for the chance to hang out with Burt even one more time?

A smile began to play at the corners of Tom’s lips as he started searching the faces of the people in the garden. But at the same time, he became dimly aware of a noise in the background. What was that?

Oh no, Tom thought.

It was his phone! Right on cue. His stupid cell phone was ringing again, playing the guitar riff from the old Merle Haggard song. A sour feeling came into Tom’s stomach and rose from there up into his throat. If he turned away from the park… if he answered that phone… would it take him back? To the nightmare? To the pain? To the horror?

He did not want that to happen. He did not want to go back.

Well, why should he? All he had to do was take one more step, one more, and he would enter this beautiful and peaceful place forever. No more monsters. No more fog and fear. No more suffering. Why would he ever turn back? Why would he ever want to answer that phone?

Behind him, the phone kept ringing, singing insistently. Tom gave a fierce shake of his head, determined to ignore it. He would continue forward. He would walk into the beautiful park. He would find his brother. He and Burt would be together again.

Why was he hesitating?

A memory. A memory from his childhood had sparked and flared in Tom’s mind, just a flash, there and gone in a single instant. Such a strange, random thing to think about. Why had it come to him? And why did it make him pause?

He had remembered how three of Burt’s friends came to the house once for a sleepover a long time ago. Tom was just a little boy then, five or six. He was supposed to go upstairs to bed early. But he begged his mom to let him hang out with the big kids. Mom said he could stay up with them for a little while if it was okay with Burt. And Burt said it was okay.

This was before Tom and Burt had redone the basement. The best TV they had was in the back room then. Tom was thrilled to sit there cross-legged on the rug and watch the movie Tuck Everlasting with the big kids. He didn’t say much. He was afraid Burt’s friends would make fun of him if he did. He just sat and listened to the big-kid talk and watched the show.

After a while, Burt had gotten up and gone into the kitchen to make some popcorn. While he was gone, one of his friends—Vince Lindstrom, his name was—had started talking to Tom.

“Hey, did you hear about the guy with the hook?” Vince asked him.

Tom had not heard about the guy with the hook. Vince began to tell him. He told him that there was a man roaming around Springland who had a big hook where his right hand should have been. Vince said the hook guy crept into kids’ bedrooms at night, hooked them around the neck, and stole them away.

“It’s a true story,” Vince said.

Tom didn’t really believe Vince, but he sort of did believe him at the same time. Anyway, he started to get scared—really scared that he might go to bed and the hook guy would come into his room and steal him.

Finally, Burt came back with the popcorn.

“Hey, Burt,” said Vince, with a big grin. “I’ve been telling your brother all about the hook.”

Burt carefully set the bowl of popcorn down on the table by the sofa. Then he walked over and gave Vince a slap on the back of the head. It was a friendly slap—but not that friendly. Hard enough—whack!—so that Vince cried out.

“Ow! Hey! What’s that for?”

“Don’t lie to him,” said Burt.

“Aw, I was just giving him a hard time,” said Vince, rubbing the spot on his head where Burt had thwacked him.

“You can give him a hard time all you want. You can tease him. You can make fun of him. He’s my little brother. That’s what he’s here for. But don’t ever lie to him. It’s not allowed.”

Even though he was just a little kid, Tom had somehow understood this—understood why Burt made this rule. He and Burt didn’t have a father. Their father had left before Tom was born. Tom had never even seen the man. Mom was a great mom. She worked hard to pay for their house and for food and everything. She was an assistant at a law firm—a paralegal—and sometimes she had to stay up with her papers long into the night to get all her work done. But she still found time to be Mom, to make breakfast, to make sure her sons got to school, to help them with their homework and all that. There was nothing wrong with Mom, it was just…

It was just that without a father, Tom felt that there was no one in his life who would tell him the truth, no matter what. There were just some things Mom wouldn’t say to him, some things she was too nice to say or too embarrassed to say. She would never say, for instance, You are acting like a complete and total idiot, even if he was. She would never say, If that bully bothers you again, slug him one in the cake-hole. She would never tell him what girls were really thinking about. Stuff like that.

But Burt would tell him those things. No matter what the subject was, no matter what the problem was, Burt would tell it to him straight, as much as he knew and as much as he thought Tom could understand. It wasn’t that Burt was always right. Sometimes he didn’t know the answers. Sometimes he got the answers wrong. But Tom knew Burt would never lie to him intentionally, never say anything he didn’t believe. That was the rule.

And that was the memory that came back to Tom as he stood hesitating on the border of the garden, as he stood looking out over the green grass and the bright flowers and the majestic Greek temples. He heard the phone ringing behind him, ringing and ringing, threatening to draw him back into a world of pain and fear.

Why had he remembered that night of the sleepover? Why did it make him hesitate to step into the garden?

The answer came to him.

No matter how peaceful this garden seemed, he was here because the man in the computer had lied to him, had tricked him, had talked him into going back out into the hall where the malevolent monsters were waiting.

But Burt—Burt had told him to fight. Burt’s voice had shouted to him from the television set, telling him not to give in to the monsters, not to despair—that despair was never an option. Burt had urged him to find the baseball bat—the Warrior—and make a stand against the creatures who wanted to destroy him.

And Burt never lied.

Tom gazed longingly at this mysterious parkland that seemed to him like heaven. His heart yearned for its beauty and its peace. The phone ringing insistently behind him sounded irritating and discordant. He knew that if he turned back to answer it, he would step right back into a nightmare.

But he knew—he knew in his heart—that Burt would want him to go back. Go back and fight—go back and figure out what was going on—get to the bottom of things, get to the truth of the matter.

Tom was a reporter, after all. Finding the truth was his business. Finding the truth—even when it was painful, even when it went against his own inclinations and desires. Even when it made everyone in school hate him.

He took one last yearning look around him. The green lawn. The white temples. The golden light. He wanted to go into the park. He wanted to go to heaven.

But he heard the phone singing its song in the distance behind him. He summoned all the willpower he had and turned back to answer it.

12.

Tom blinked, confused. Where was he?

He looked around him. His eyes passed over the framed newspaper stories, the sports pennants, the long flag from Burt’s coffin. He was in his bedroom at home.

A dream, he thought. Heaven was a dream.

He heard the guitar riff, the Haggard song, his phone ringing. He twisted until he could see the phone on his computer table. It jumped and rattled around as it rang.

A dream, he thought again. It was all just…

No. Wait. He sat up in bed quickly, tossing the comforter aside. He remembered. The heavenly park. This empty house. The fog outside. The monsters.

This was no dream. This was real—bizarre but totally real. And it was all happening again!

He reached out quickly and grabbed the phone. Checked the readout to see who was calling.

Number blocked.

Right. Just like before. He remembered that, too. The phone vibrated in his hand as it rang again. He answered.

He knew what he would hear before he heard it. There it was. That static. Weird white noise coming from an alien and frightening place far away. He listened intently. Next there would be a voice. The voice of that ghostly woman in the white blouse…

It began, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

He could hear her a little better this time, a little more clearly than he’d heard her before.

“Where are you?” he said, trying to keep his own voice steady and clear. “I need to find you. I need to know where you are.”

“My address is…” Then the static overwhelmed her. Her voice was swept under the crackle and hiss.

“What’s your address?” Tom shouted. “Say it again.”

The woman tried again, calling to him from beneath the static. Her voice was now so dim that Tom’s face contorted with the effort to make out her words.

“…school… you left my address…”

“At school?” Tom said, straining to hear her. “I left your address at school?”

Yes. That was right. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew. Her address was at the office of the Sentinel. He had scribbled it on a pad there.

“Please… please… you have to…,” the woman called to him—and then, as he knew they would, the two beeps came. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the readout.

Connection lost.

This time Tom didn’t hesitate. He leapt out of bed. He rushed to his dresser. He pulled on his sweatpants and the Tigers sweatshirt as fast as he could.

A familiar feeling of excitement was coursing through him: the feeling he got when a news story began to come together, when things began to make sense. This was what he loved about working on the Sentinel: finding the answers. And he was beginning to find them now. He was beginning to figure this crazy thing out, beginning to understand what was happening.

And he knew what he had to do next.

He didn’t bother to stop in the bathroom this time. It didn’t matter whether he shaved or not. None of that ordinary stuff mattered anymore. He just had to get to the basement as fast as he could. It was a matter of life and death.

He stampeded down the stairs into the front hall. He paused at the door only a moment to look out through the sidelight. The lawn and the driveway were clear again. No fog. He could see all the way down to the end of the driveway. The newspaper was lying there near the street, just as it had been the first time. And the mist was beginning to gather in the street as it had before, too. Soon, he knew, the fog would move in. It would become thick again. And it would bring the malevolents with it.

He didn’t have a lot of time. He had to hurry.

He ran down the hall to the kitchen, to the basement door. As he pulled the door open, he half expected to hear Burt’s voice again, shouting from the TV screen.

This is your mission!

But no. It was different this time. The basement was silent. Tom understood. Burt had called to him before because he wanted to get him to come down, to see what was on television, to face a truth his mind didn’t want to face. Burt had reached out to him from an impossible distance and done the best he could to get his message across the gulf between them.

But this time Tom didn’t need that help. This time he was ready to face the truth on his own. He was scared—he was very scared—but he was ready.

He went down the stairs.

He came into the family room. Saw the TV with its dark screen. The silent speakers. Fighting down the anxiety that tightened his throat, he moved to the easy chairs. There was the remote lying on the seat of the nearest chair. He picked it up. Pointed it at the TV. Pressed the Power button.

It was time to face the facts.

For a moment, the TV stayed dark. The silence went on for such a long time that Tom began to think he had gotten it wrong, that he would have to look for the truth elsewhere. Another silent second passed, and then another. Tom started to turn away.

Then a voice startled him by shouting over the speakers, “Dr. Leonard to the ER—stat!”

There it was. Just like before. Only different. The voice was calling for Dr. Leonard this time, not Dr. Cooper. Tom got it. Dr. Cooper was just a character in the TV show Mom liked. Dr. Leonard was real. Tom had seen The Cooper Practice on the screen before because he wasn’t ready to face reality. Now he was. At least he hoped he was.

The TV came on. The nurses and aides and doctors were crowding around the gurney as they rolled it up the corridor to the emergency operating room.

“Single GSW to the chest!”

“His pulse is falling fast!”

“Clear Trauma One.”

They rolled the gurney down the hall and came to an alcove hidden behind a curtain. One of the aides tore the curtain aside, and the gurney was rushed through into the emergency operating room.

“Where’s Dr. Leonard?”

“Here I am. What have we got?”

“Single GSW to the chest. We’re losing him.”

“Get him onto the operating table. On my count of three.”

The people around the gurney leaned in as the doctor counted off.

“One, two—three.”

Tom’s pulse sped up as he watched them lift the body—the body hidden behind their bodies—from the gurney onto the operating table. He knew what was going to happen next, of course. He knew what he was going to see.

The crowd around the operating table broke apart—and there he was. Tom stood in the basement and stared helplessly as he saw himself on the television set. He saw himself lying unconscious on the operating table, his torso covered in blood. The doctors and nurses darted here and there around him. One nurse sliced Tom’s shirt off with a small knife, and another began to clean his wound. A third worked a tube into his throat so he would be able to breathe. Once again it made Tom gag as he stood there watching it happen on the screen. He felt his legs go weak beneath him as he watched. He sank down slowly into the easy chair behind him. Leaning forward on the edge of his seat, he went on staring at the scene.

But the next moment was so difficult for him to watch that he had to narrow his eyes until they were almost shut—make the images less clear, less devastating. Even so, he could hardly bear the sight of the doctor laying the blade of the scalpel against his bare skin. He let out a groan as he watched the blade slice into his flesh, the red blood flowing out from underneath the flashing steel.

Sitting in the armchair, Tom flinched with pain. He bent forward and grabbed his chest. It was as if he could actually feel them cutting him open, could feel them tearing his flesh apart to get at the bullet lodged inside him. The scene on the television set—the television set itself—the basement family room—everything—seemed to tumble and spin around him. Reality seemed to retreat into murky darkness. Tom felt himself fading away until his consciousness became a dwindling point of light surrounded by a vaster and vaster emptiness—an emptiness like space itself.

He blinked and shook his head fiercely, fighting his way back to full awareness. He forced himself to stare through the murk of his mind, to see the TV clearly again. Even if it meant he had to watch himself being cut open, he had to know what had happened. He had to know the truth.

But now—thankfully!—he saw that the scene had changed. The operating room was gone. Tom saw himself lying in a bed now. A number of tubes ran out of his body, out of his arm and out from under the blankets. Fluid dripped into him from a bag of some sort. A monitor was beeping by his head. A respirator was pumping air into him. He was lying in a hospital room now. Unconscious. Still.

The camera slowly drew back so that Tom could see more of the room. He saw a small wooden chair beside his bed. He saw a woman sitting there.

As he watched, Tom let out a soft groan of surprise and pain and longing.

The woman in the chair was his mom.

The sight of his mother sitting in the hospital room beside him made Tom’s heart feel tight and small. She was sitting bent forward, her head bowed, her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her as if she was in prayer. She was rocking herself back and forth, back and forth at the edge of the mattress on which Tom lay motionless. She wasn’t crying, but when she raised her eyes to look at her unconscious son, the expression on her face was awful to see. It was a look of such wasted grief that Tom wanted to jam his hand through the television screen so he could touch her, comfort her. He hadn’t seen his mom look so bad since… well, since the army officers had come to tell her that Burt had been killed in action. He wanted to call out to her, to say, I’m here, Mom. I’m not that figure on the bed. I’m right here.

But he didn’t. He knew she wouldn’t hear him. She was there, in that reality. And he was here, in this one.

So he just sat there, watching helplessly—which was so painful to him that he felt a powerful urge to close his eyes and turn away. But he understood that if he did that, the television would turn itself off. That’s what had happened before. The scenes on TV were just projections from his own mind. The set had gone dark before because he hadn’t been ready to face the whole truth. If he refused to face it now, there would be darkness again and he didn’t know if the TV would ever come back on.

He had to force himself to go on watching. It was like forcing himself to ask a source difficult questions during an interview. It could be awkward, even painful, but sometimes he had to do it. The only difference now was that he was the source—the source as well as the reporter. Watching the TV was like interviewing his own brain. He had to force himself to want the truth more than he wanted to escape the pain of knowing.

Whatever happens, he thought, whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s better to know than not to know. There’s no other way to live.

So he leaned forward in his chair and concentrated as hard as he could. He suffered through the pain of watching his mother as she wrung her hands and rocked herself, as she stared at him where he lay on the bed motionless as a corpse.

Now a new figure entered the scene. It was a man in blue scrubs—those pajama-like outfits doctors wear. He was a man in his thirties with black hair. He had bland features and pale, almost pasty skin. He wore glasses with heavy frames and blinked rapidly behind them, which made him look very young and sort of helpless. Tom knew somehow that this was the surgeon who had cut him open: Dr. Leonard.

Tom’s mother got quickly to her feet. Tom’s throat grew tight as he saw the look of terror deep in her eyes. She searched the doctor’s face for news, trying to guess what he was going to say before he said it.

“Mrs. Harding?” the doctor said.

“Yes,” Mom answered. Her voice was hoarse, almost a whisper. “What’s happening to my son? Is he going to be all right? Is he going to… ?”

She couldn’t say the word—the word die. But Tom knew that’s what she was asking. She went on searching the doctor’s face for the answer. And Tom stared at the scene on the television, waiting for the answer, too. Was he going to die? Was that what was happening to him? Was that why nothing made sense around him? Was he dying—or already dead and in some limbo waiting for God to decide whether he should go to heaven or hell? Marie had told him no, he wasn’t dead, but maybe she had gotten it wrong. Maybe…

“Your son is alive, but…,” Dr. Leonard said. He hesitated, and Tom’s mother reached out convulsively and gripped his arm.

“But what? Tell me.”

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor went on, “and I’m afraid he’s fallen into a coma.”

For a second, Tom’s mother seemed unable to understand. She slowly shook her head, narrowing her eyes.

“A coma? I don’t… For how long? Will he come back? Will he wake up?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Leonard. “Mrs. Harding, please sit down.”

He gestured toward her chair. Mrs. Harding sank back into it. The doctor pulled up another chair and sat down beside her. Her eyes never left his face. She went on staring at him, openmouthed.

“Mrs. Harding,” Dr. Leonard went on gently. “Your son was wounded very badly. The bullet nicked his superior vena cava—one of his major blood vessels—and punctured his lung…”

Tom’s mother made an awful noise and covered her mouth with both hands.

“While he was on the operating table,” Dr. Leonard said, “his heart stopped…”

Tom’s mother lowered her hands and said, “You mean he died?”

“Well,” said the doctor, “I suppose you could put it like that, yes. Yes, he did. We were able to revive him, but… well, until he regains consciousness, we won’t know very much about how he is or how much damage he suffered.”

“Damage?” Tom’s mother said. “You mean…”

“Brain damage.”

Sitting in the chair, watching the scene on the television, Tom groaned aloud. His mother began to cry.

The doctor tried to reassure her, touching her shoulder. “We just don’t know. We can’t tell yet. He may come out of this in an hour. And he may be totally fine. Or…”

“Or he may never come out of it,” Mom said through her tears. “He may die.”

Dr. Leonard nodded. “We can’t promise you anything. We just don’t know. Unless or until he comes around, there’s not that much I can tell you.”

Tom’s mother couldn’t take any more. She turned away from the doctor. She reached out and took Tom’s hand where it lay limp atop the bedcover. She brought the hand to her lips and kissed it and she began to weep. “My boys,” she said, her voice muffled by tears. “Both my boys!”

The doctor stood up silently and walked out. As he did, Tom saw for the first time that there was another bed in the room. Another man was lying in the second bed, hooked up to a bunch of tubes like Tom, unconscious like Tom. As his mother sobbed beside him, Tom stared at this other man in the other bed.

“What?” he said aloud.

Shocked, he realized he recognized the man in the bed. It was the lanky young man with dirty blond hair, the man he had seen in the heavenly garden looking lost and afraid. Tom saw that both the man’s wrists were bandaged.

Tom shut his eyes. It was too much. His mother in such an agony of sorrow. The man from the heavenly park in the hospital room. He couldn’t understand it all. He couldn’t bear to think about it anymore. He looked away—and instantly, the TV snapped off and went blank.

In the silence of the basement room, Tom put a trembling hand to his forehead. He closed his eyes. For a long moment, he couldn’t think at all. He just sat there, his mind empty of everything—everything except confusion and the image of his mom weeping over him—and the pain and sorrow he felt for her.

Then he lowered his hand and his shoulders slumped. Well, now he had what he wanted. Now he knew the truth.

He looked at the TV. At the blank screen. He thought: Help me, dude. Help me. He was trying to reach Burt somehow, trying to get Burt to come back on the screen, to talk to him, to tell him what he should do, how he could get himself out of this.

The TV remained silent, the screen blank.

Tom raised his eyes to the ceiling—to heaven. Soon, he knew, the fog would roll in again. Soon the monsters would burst through the windows again. This time there would be no escape. This time there would be no survival. He could not leave his mother in that hospital room all alone with his dead body. Her heart was already broken because of losing Burt. Losing him too would destroy her.

He had to find a way back to her, back to consciousness and life. But how? For the moment, Tom was all out of answers.

Please help me, God, he thought. I so totally don’t know what to do. Please.

He lowered his eyes to the TV again. But still: nothing. Silence.

Then he nearly jumped to his feet as he heard a loud noise upstairs.

Someone—or something—was pounding on the front door.

13.

The mist in the driveway had thickened. The figure standing in the mist looked like Death.

Tom had come running up from the basement as soon as he’d heard the pounding on the door. But even as he crested the stairs, before he even started down the hallway to the foyer, the pounding stopped. Now he was standing at the front door, peering out through the sidelight. He saw the figure who had been knocking. It was retreating, moving slowly down the front path, deeper into the thickening mist.

The figure wore a black raincoat, a black hood. It was a grim and ominous sight that made Tom’s stomach go sour with fear.

Like Death.

The ghostly figure glided slowly away from him, toward the deeper mist already gathering at the bottom of the driveway. Soon, Tom knew, the figure would vanish into the marine layer, the same way the woman in the white blouse had vanished the last time.

And yet Tom did not move from where he was. He did not open the door. He didn’t call out. He wasn’t sure whether he should. The cowled figure was so frightening to look at that he was afraid if he called to it—if it turned—it might actually present the skeletal face of the Grim Reaper. Would it come to him then and claim him and carry him away to his own grave?

Tom thought about it one more second while the cowled figure continued to move down the walk, growing hazier and dimmer as the mist collected around it.

Then he made up his mind. He had come back to this house to find the truth. He would find it, even if it wore the face of Death itself.

He pulled the door open. He stepped out across the threshold.

“Wait!” he called, his voice trembling.

The hooded figure stopped, stood still. The mist on the front lawn blew and swirled and grew denser and the figure grew more vague, more ghostly. A shiver of cold and fear went through Tom as he felt the damp of the mist touch his skin. He suddenly felt very vulnerable. He knew the malevolents were out here, moving in the fog, not far away, getting closer every moment.

He forced himself to speak. “Who are you?”

Slowly, the figure began to turn around. It faced him. Its features were obscured in the shadow of the hood.

Tom held his breath. He thought: Is this it? Is this Death? Is this the end?

Then the figure lifted a hand—a small white hand. It pushed the hood back. A mass of red hair tumbled free, framing a pug-nosed, freckled face. Green eyes blinked at him from behind the round lenses of a pair of glasses.

It was Lisa McKay.

Tom let out a breath of sweet relief as Lisa broke out into a tremulous smile.

“Thank heavens!” she said. “I was afraid you were already gone!”

“Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs.”

In the days after the story broke, Tom’s life was like a thunderstorm: long periods of gloom and turmoil and darkness punctuated by sudden shafts of dazzling light. There were the glowering looks in the school halls every day; black, angry looks in class even from his friends, even from some of his teachers. There were whispers as he walked the halls: “Traitor.” “Creep.” “Liar.” There were hard shots from the shoulders of some of the bigger guys as they passed him. Every morning he awoke with dread, walked to school with dread, knowing he was going to face it all again. Long, gloomy, stormy hours. And then suddenly…

Suddenly, Marie. Marie’s eyes; Marie’s lips; Marie’s voice, a gentle whisper. Her golden hair spilling around a face like a porcelain doll’s. She sought him out on the playing field after lunch. She sat with him under the oak tree during study period. She let him drive her home. She sat in the car with him and put her hand in his.

He could not believe it was happening. It was as if his daydreams had sprung to life.

“Won’t everyone hate you?” he asked her. They were sitting together on a windowsill early one morning, just before the homeroom bell rang. “For hanging out with me, I mean.”

“I don’t care what everyone thinks,” she told him. “And neither should you.”

“What about… ?” He didn’t want to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. “What about Gordon? I always thought… Well, everyone always thought you were with Gordon.”

“Like I said,” she answered softly, leaning toward him. “I don’t care what everyone thinks. I want you to come to my house next week, Tom. Daddy wants to meet you.”

Her face was so close to his just then that he felt breathless. “Really?” he said.

But before Marie could answer, the moment was shattered.

“Tom.”

Tom blinked. Looked up from Marie as if coming awake. Miss Dunphy, the principal’s assistant, was standing over them. “Mr. Kramer would like to see you in his office,” she said. “Right now.”

Mr. Kramer, the principal, was waiting for him in the conference room. And not just Mr. Kramer. Coach Petrie was there, too—the Tigers’ coach and the head of the Physical Education Department—and so was Mrs. Rafferty, the English teacher who was supposed to supervise the publication of the Sentinel but never really did. They were all sitting around the long table, looking at Tom as he entered the room. And the minute Tom saw the expressions on their faces, he knew he was in for big-time trouble.

Mr. Kramer sat at the table’s head. He was a young-looking man, in his early forties. He had short white hair, and his eyes were such a pale gray as to be almost colorless. Usually he was a pretty friendly guy, but when the smile disappeared from his face, there was something almost chilling about those transparent eyes of his. There was nothing like a smile on his face now.

He indicated an empty chair and Tom sat down, feeling his stomach jump with anxiety.

Mr. Kramer cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “We want to talk to you about this story you wrote in the newspaper,” he said. “To publicly accuse our football team of taking drugs three years ago—our championship team—that’s a very serious charge, you know. We’re very proud of our team in this school, Tom.”

Tom opened his mouth to answer, but then he jumped in his chair as—wham!—Coach Petrie slapped the table loudly. The coach was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, and the muscles in his arms tensed and bulged. “It’s a lie, that’s what it is!” he growled. “You asked me about it and I told you myself it was a lie, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that?”

Mr. Kramer made a calming gesture at him. “Hold on, Coach,” he said. Then he went on to Tom, “I think what Coach is trying to say is that we’re disappointed you went ahead and wrote the story even after he explained to you that there was no truth in it. That’s irresponsible, Tom.”

Tom drew a breath, hoping he could keep his voice steady. “I quoted Coach in the story,” he said. “I gave him a chance to tell his side of it.”

“Yeah, and then you made me sound like some kind of liar,” Coach Petrie snapped back.

Tom felt a cold sweat break out on the back of his neck. This was bad, really bad. Three adults—three powerful adults—angry at him. No, furious. Coach Petrie looked like he wanted to wring his neck.

He forced himself to return their glares with a steady gaze. “The story wasn’t irresponsible,” he said. “My sources gave me proof of everything they told me. Cell phone pictures. E-mails. Personal testimonies from players who took the steroids. It’s all in the paper and I checked it all myself. The story was solid. The players took drugs. We won the championship unfairly. Those are the facts.”

Tom recoiled—he couldn’t help it—as Coach pointed a finger right in his face. “You are calling me a liar, aren’t you? How dare you disrespect me? Who do you think you are?”

“I’m just saying it’s the truth,” said Tom as steadily as he could. He wished he were somewhere else right now. Somewhere like Mars.

“You’re supposed to run all stories by me for approval,” Mrs. Rafferty broke in, her voice clipped and hard. She was a large, pasty-faced woman with short red hair that curled up out of her head like fire. “I would never have approved the newspaper running a story like this.”

Tom knew that Lisa always e-mailed the paper to Mrs. Rafferty for approval—and that Mrs. Rafferty never read it and never responded. But he hadn’t personally seen Lisa send the e-mail this time, and he didn’t want to sound like he was blaming Lisa for anything, so he kept his mouth shut.

“All right,” said Mr. Kramer, making another conciliatory gesture at the others. “Let’s not waste time with anger and recriminations. Let’s see if we can make this right. Tom, if we let this story stand, it’s going to have serious repercussions. The school board is going to ask questions, the interscholastic sports governors, maybe even the state Board of Ed. I’m going to need to have as much information as I can in order to answer them and explain how this rumor got started and how it got out of hand like this. To begin with, I need to know who told you these tales about the team.”

The sweat gathering on Tom’s neck rolled down his back, making his shirt damp. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “My sources gave me this information on the condition I keep their names secret. I promised them I would.”

Tom started as Coach Petrie slapped the table again. “Well, you are going to break that promise, son, believe you me,” he said.

“I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in,” said Mrs. Rafferty—and the way she said it made Tom feel that her hair was going to catch fire for real. “You are facing suspension here.”

Tom’s mouth went dry. Suspension! That was not good. That was bad, in fact. It would go on his record. It would hurt his chances of getting into a top college. Worse than that: he didn’t know how he would tell his mom.

But he knew he had no choice about this. He licked his lips. He said, “The people who talked to me wouldn’t have talked if they thought they were going to be named—they were afraid of being punished and attacked for telling the truth.” The way I’m being punished and attacked for telling the truth, he didn’t add. “But they proved what they said beyond a doubt, and I printed the proof. The story is fair and it’s true. Even if you suspend me—even if you expel me—it’ll still be true.”

Mr. Kramer leaned forward, his expression as serious as Tom had ever seen it, his eyes as transparent as glass. “I hope you understand,” he said tersely. “Mrs. Rafferty is quite right about this. You are facing very serious consequences here.”

Tom took a deep, unsteady breath. “I do understand,” he said softly. “But I stand by the story. I stand by the story.”

Tom had to say it twice to get the words out clearly—and even though he meant them, he quailed inside as he saw the anger flash in Mr. Kramer’s colorless eyes.

Mrs. Rafferty started to say, “You do not know the beginning of how much trouble you are getting yourself—”

But she stopped as there was a quick knock on the door. Before anyone could say anything else, the door opened and Lisa came in.

She was wearing jeans and a striped pullover and tennis shoes. Her red hair tumbled messily down the sides of her pale face, and she blinked rapidly behind her glasses. She looked very small and skinny and much younger than she was.

“Hi, everyone!” she said in a chirpy little-girl voice. “I heard you guys were talking to Tom and I thought, since I’m the newspaper editor, maybe I should be here, too.”

“We’ll speak to you separately,” said Mr. Kramer tersely.

“And you’re not the editor anymore,” growled Mrs. Rafferty.

“Oh!” said Lisa, as if she were startled. “Really? Is this about the Tigers story?”

“It sure is!” said Coach Petrie.

“Okay,” said Lisa in that same high, bright voice. “I’m sort of surprised to hear that, because I did send the story to you for approval, Mrs. Rafferty.”

“Well, I didn’t approve it,” she snapped.

“Well, yes, I know, but you haven’t approved any of our stories since I’ve been on the paper. We always send them to you, but you never get back to us. So, you know, I didn’t think this was any different. Anyway…,” she went on chirpily, “let me know when you’re done with Tom. Because when USA Today interviews me, they’ll probably want him there, too.”

Mr. Kramer, Coach Petrie, and Mrs. Rafferty all sat up straight at the same time and said exactly the same thing: “What?!”

“USA Today,” Lisa repeated with the same cheery tone. “You know, for their story about us and the Tigers and how a school paper got a big scoop and how the school reacted to it and all that.”

Mr. Kramer’s eyes flashed again. He seemed as if he was about to slap the table himself. “I absolutely forbid you to talk to USA Today or anyone else about this until we’ve fully ascertained the facts!” he said.

And suddenly, Lisa’s chirpy, little-girl demeanor vanished—just like that. Her face became very serious, and the eyes behind the round lenses were unblinking and bright as flashing steel. Her voice became flat and hard. “With respect, Mr. Kramer,” she said, “I’ll be speaking to them after school and with my mother’s permission. You don’t have the power to forbid me. You have the power to take me and Tom off the paper. You have the power to suspend us. You have the power to close the paper down. But we told the truth and we’re going to go on telling it, in USA Today and on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else we can to whoever will listen. And I know that’ll be okay with you,” she said, turning her steady gaze from one adult to another. “Because as long as you do what’s right, you won’t mind if everyone knows.”

With that, she turned and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later Tom found her in the Sentinel’s office.

“You saved my life in there, Leese,” he said with a lopsided smile. “After they heard about USA Today, everyone suddenly got a lot more friendly. I guess they didn’t want the whole country to find out they were trying to cover up for the team.”

Lisa shrugged but blushed at the same time. “That’s what friends are for, Tommy. I knew you could stand up for yourself, but I figured, I’m the editor, it’s my responsibility to protect the story.”

Weary with relief, Tom dropped into his chair and put his feet up on the mess on his desk. “So when do we talk to USA Today?” he asked her.

Lisa shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I don’t know. They haven’t asked us yet.”

Tom’s feet dropped off the desk with a thud as he came rocketing upright in his chair. “What?”

“Well, I had to say something, right? They looked like they were about to hang you.”

“So you lied?”

“I didn’t lie. I said when USA Today interviews me, they’ll probably want to interview you, too. I’m sure that’s true.”

“Lisa!”

“Well, let’s call it a bluff,” she said.

Tom fell back against his chair, staring at her with his mouth open. After another moment, he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” said Tom. “Just remind me never to play poker with you!”

Lisa’s cheeks turned so red her freckles all but disappeared. A moment later she was giggling helplessly.

14.

Hurry!” Tom said to her now. “We don’t have much time.”

He took ahold of Lisa’s elbow as she stepped into the house. Before he shut the door behind her, he cast one last look outside, across the front lawn. Sheets and tendrils of mist were coiling up the drive and over the grass, casting a ghostly pall over everything. At the bottom of the driveway, the fog was gathering quickly. As Tom stood staring through the cloudy air, he thought he saw a shadow move in that thicker whiteness. A malevolent. Waiting for the moment when it could reach the house; reach him. Soon.

Tom shut the door.

“Come on,” he said.

He drew Lisa down the hallway to the kitchen. They sat face-to-face at the round table in the nook, just as he’d sat with Marie. Outside, through the windows, a faint mist had begun to gather over the backyard as well. Tom knew it would get thicker quickly. The malevolents were on their way.

Still gripping her elbow, Tom leaned toward Lisa. She had opened her raincoat now. Beneath it, she was wearing the pink blouse he knew was her favorite. The top button was undone, and a gold necklace with a little gold cross shone against the white skin of her throat. Tom could not believe how good it was to see that quirky, freckled, pug-nosed face of hers. He felt certain she would be able to help him find the truth. She always had.

“I was shot, wasn’t I?” he asked her. “That’s why I’m here. Someone shot me in the chest.”

Lisa nodded quickly. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked serious, pale, worried. “That’s right.”

“Who was it? Who did it, Leese?”

“I don’t know. No one knows. The police are still trying to find out.”

“But it must’ve been someone who was angry at me about our story, right? Someone who was angry because of what I wrote about the Tigers.”

“Probably. That’s what everyone thinks, anyway.”

“I should know who it is!” he said. “But I don’t remember.”

“Well, you’re hurt.”

“Right. I’m in a coma, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I’m lying unconscious in the hospital, and the doctors can’t wake me up.”

Lisa frowned, her eyes growing damp. “Yes, that’s right. It’s awful. We’re all so frightened.”

Tom tried to take this in, to think it through. He was still holding loosely on to Lisa’s arm. Lisa moved her hand to his. Her cool touch was comforting.

“And so all this,” he said, gesturing at the kitchen. “All this is happening in my mind, in my imagination.”

Lisa tilted her head, her expression uncertain. “Well… yes… but…”

“But what?” said Tom. He could feel the time passing, could feel the fog moving in. He knew that every second counted. “Tell me. Don’t hold anything back.”

“Well… just because something is in your imagination doesn’t mean it’s imaginary.”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Your imagination isn’t just some kind of fantasyland or something. It’s a way of seeing things that your rational mind can’t see or doesn’t want to see. It’s a way of knowing things you can’t know any other way. The things you see with your imagination may not look like the things you see in ordinary life, but they’re just as real in their own way. And all this—everything that’s happening here, Tom—it’s all real. And it’s serious. It’s like… It’s like your imagination is the battleground on which you’re fighting for your life.”

“Right,” said Tom, trying to stay with her, trying to understand. “The fog, the monsters, the malevolents…”

“They can kill you—really kill you. They already have killed you. Twice! Your heart has already stopped beating two times.”

Tom nodded. “Yes. I know. I died. I even saw heaven, I think.”

“Well,” said Lisa, looking uncertain again, “I don’t think it could have been heaven. Not exactly. Not the real heaven. This is your imagination, remember—and I think heaven is probably beyond anything you could imagine.”

“But if I died, maybe I saw it for a second…,” Tom started to say. His voice trailed away as he remembered the things he had seen in the park, the strangely unhappy-looking people.

“Maybe,” said Lisa. “It’s possible.” She smiled. “But, like I said, I don’t think so. The road to heaven isn’t death, Tom. It’s life.”

Tom went on thinking about it. He went on thinking about the beautiful parkland with the Greek temples and about the people he’d seen there—the people who weren’t serene and happy the way you’d think they would be if they were in paradise.

“There was a guy there,” he murmured. “A thin guy with long blond hair. I think he’s in the hospital with me. I think he’s the guy lying unconscious in the bed next to mine.”

“Yeah,” said Lisa. “The doctor said he was some kind of drug addict, hooked on meth or something. He couldn’t take it anymore. He tried to slash his wrists, to kill himself. They don’t know whether he’s going to make it.”

Tom thought about the long-haired guy standing in front of the temple, how he looked lost, like he was trying to find someone who could give him directions. So Lisa was right. The parkland wasn’t heaven. Even though Tom’s heart had stopped, the place he had seen was still some part of his living mind. If he really died, then there would be something else, something more. Something, as Lisa said, beyond his imagination.

Tom glanced away from the anxious expression on Lisa’s face. He glanced out the window into the backyard. Already the mist was noticeably thicker out there. He could see it wafting in, blowing in, more and more of it every second. Soon it would be thick enough to bring the malevolents. Very soon.

He faced Lisa again. “What about you?” he said. “Are you real?”

“You know I am, Tommy.”

He smiled, in spite of his worry and fear. Tommy. Lisa was the only one who ever called him that. And she only did it when she was emotional, when she forgot to control herself and call him Tom like everyone else did. “But I mean… are you really here now?” he asked her. “Really here with me?”

“I’m sitting beside your hospital bed. I’m holding your hand just like this. I’m talking to you. The doctors said that if I talked to you, you might be able to hear me.”

“I do hear you,” he said. “I mean… I don’t think… I don’t think this is what you’re really saying exactly. I think a lot of this conversation is me talking to myself in my own mind. But I hear the sound of your voice and… I can feel you’re there. And I’m glad you’re there, Lisa. You’ve always been a good friend.”

Lisa tried to smile, but her mouth trembled down quickly in a deep frown. The lenses of her glasses grew misty. And a thought flashed through Tom’s mind, a new thought, one he’d never had before. It was a thought he could barely believe, but there it was anyway. He thought that maybe Lisa liked him—really liked him, not just as a friend, but as more than that. Funny, all that time they’d spent together in the Sentinel’s office, and he’d never noticed it before. Until this moment, he’d been thinking about Marie so much, yearning for Marie so much, that it never crossed his mind.

Lisa’s grip tightened on his hand. “Tom,” she said softly. “Listen to me. The doctors say…”

She faltered. He answered her grip with his own. “Go on.”

“The doctors say if they lose you again, if your heart stops beating again, they doubt they’ll be able to revive you. They doubt you’ll be strong enough to make it back. And you’ve got to make it back, Tommy! You’ve got to. I don’t think I could… I don’t think your mother could survive if she lost you like she lost Burt.”

“Right. Right.” Tom took a deep breath, braced himself. “What are my chances?” he asked her. “Did the doctors say? What are the chances I’ll come out of this coma alive?”

“They said…” Lisa’s voice broke. A single tear spilled from behind her misted lenses, rolled down her freckled cheek. “They said they didn’t know. They said it was fifty-fifty. It could go either way.”

Tom made a noise: whew. “Fifty-fifty,” he repeated. “And if I die again, I’m done for. So I only have one more chance, and if the malevolents get me this time…”

Lisa only nodded, unable to speak.

Tom swallowed hard. “Fifty-fifty. One chance. Live or die. Man, that’s scary. I’m scared, Lisa. I’m seventeen. I’m not ready to die. But I don’t know if I’ve got the courage to…”

“Shh! Shh!” She put a finger to his lips, silencing him. Then she pulled her hand away to wipe her cheek dry. “You have plenty of courage. All you need. More.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Tom. “I was never the hero type. Not like Burt.”

“Yes, you are,” Lisa told him, crying harder. “You’re just as brave as Burt ever was. Just in a different way, that’s all. That’s…” She couldn’t finish. She bowed her head.

Tom looked at her, looked at the top of her head, the part in her hair where a line of white scalp peeked through the wavy red. He didn’t know why, but the sight of it made her seem fragile to him somehow. Which was funny, seeing as he was the one in the coma, on the brink of death! But he was sorry now that he’d shown her his fear, sorry he’d made her cry. Even if she couldn’t really see it sitting there in the hospital next to his bed, he wanted to give her strength, to send his strength to her, his courage to her.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Fifty-fifty. It’s better than nothing, right? I’ll take my chances. But what do I do? How do I find my way out of here? How do I get out of this coma and get back to you?”

It was a long moment before Lisa could lift her head, could speak again. Then she said, “I’m not sure, but I can tell you what I think.”

Tom knew that the information she was giving him was really information coming from the depths of his own mind. But he needed to hear it. He needed to hear it spoken out loud. He said, “Go on.”

“I think there’s something holding you here, something that won’t let you leave.”

“Okay. Like what?”

“I don’t know. Believe me, if I knew I would tell you. But there’s something, something that wants to keep you in the dark, that wants to keep you in this coma, that maybe even… even wants you to die.”

“Whoa.” He swallowed hard. “Whoa,” he said again. “How do I find it, then? How do I get rid of it?”

“Well, whatever it is,” Lisa said, “it must be here somewhere. It must be something inside your own mind. Something you know but can’t get to somehow.”

“You mean, like, something I’ve forgotten. Or something I’m blocking out.”

“That’s right. I think…,” Lisa went on—and Tom could tell she was working it out as she spoke. “I think maybe if you could find out what happened to you, find out who shot you—who shot you and why—then you could break the barrier, break through and face the truth and wake up.”

Her damp eyes gazed into his with so much feeling that Tom looked away, embarrassed. He looked down at the table.

“That’s got to be it, Tom,” Lisa said. “Find the truth. The truth is always the way, even when it’s scary, even when it’s hard. It’s like the Bible says, you know. Find the truth—and the truth will set you free.”

Tom felt a fresh energy go through him, a fresh fire of inspiration. He raised his eyes to hers. They looked at each other for a long moment, and Tom had the strangest feeling that he had never really seen Lisa before. Sure, he’d seen her face. He’d seen her goofy sense of humor and her insecurity about her looks. He’d seen her courage in trying to deal with her parents’ divorce and with the fact that she and her mom didn’t have much money anymore, even though they used to be rich. He’d seen her—but he’d never seen her like this, never seen the sweet whole of her, the way he was seeing her now, here in his imagination. It was a sight that filled him up in a way he couldn’t have described.

Slowly, she drew her hand away from him.

A new bout of fear went through him. “Don’t,” he whispered before he could stop himself. “Don’t leave me.”

“I have to, Tom.” She stood up. “This isn’t something I can do with you.” She tried to smile. “I’m just the editor, right? I can send you out on a story, but you’ve got to find the answers on your own.”

He looked up at her. He tried his best to smile. “Man! This imagination—it can be a pretty scary place, you know? I don’t want to be alone in here.”

“Oh, Tommy,” said Lisa. “You’re not alone!” Quickly, she reached behind her neck and undid the clasp of her gold necklace. She drew it off her throat and pressed it into his hand. Tom looked down and saw the gold cross gleaming in his palm. “You’re not alone, Tommy,” Lisa said again. “Just find the truth. And the truth will set you free.”

Tom closed his fist around her necklace and held it fast.

The next time he looked up, Lisa was gone.

15.

The moments passed. The house was silent around him. The fog gathered in the backyard. Tom knew his time was running out and yet second after second, he sat where he was, staring at his closed fist.

Find the truth, and the truth will set you free.

All right. Good advice. But how did he do it? How could he find the truth? Where did he begin?

Come on, he told himself. You’re the steely-eyed, big-brained reporter. Figure it out, bro.

He shook his fist as he went on gazing down at it. To find the whole truth, he needed to know who shot him—who shot him, and why. And hey, how hard could it be to get that information? He had been shot in the chest, after all. The person who shot him must have been standing right in front of him. He must have seen the person at the time it happened. He must already know who it was. So, as Lisa said, the answer must be here somewhere, somewhere inside his mind. But where?

Well, his memory, that’s where.

Being in a coma and all, being trapped inside his own imagination, there were obviously things he couldn’t remember. So to find those things, somehow he had to get from here, from his imagination, to his memory. But where was that?

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

He almost heard Marie’s gentle voice speak the words. Marie had told him to go to the monastery. That must be the way, and yet…

And yet, it didn’t make sense to him. The way to his memory should be through the things he remembered. But he didn’t remember being in the monastery. He didn’t remember that at all.

There was something else, too. The man in the computer. The Lying Man who had told him that the monsters were gone and it was safe to go out into the hall. The Lying Man had told him to go to the monastery, too. The Lying Man had also told him that’s where the answers were. Now, okay, maybe the Lying Man had told him the truth about the monastery just to trick him into leaving his bedroom. But Tom had a feeling that the Lying Man never told the truth, not really. Tom had the feeling that everything the Lying Man said was either an outright lie or some other kind of deception.

As he thought about that, an image came into his mind. It was the image of Marie, sitting right here, right in the kitchen, at this very table. He remembered the way she reacted when he wanted to answer his phone. The way she tried to stop him when he wanted to go downstairs to see his brother on TV. Why would she do that? Why would she try to stop him from seeing Burt? Why didn’t she want him to answer the phone?

It’s not that he didn’t trust Marie, he told himself. That would be crazy. Why wouldn’t he trust her? It was just that… well, he didn’t want to do anything the Lying Man told him to do, that’s all. That’s all.

So where did that leave him?

The seconds passed. He went on sitting there, gripping the necklace, shaking his fist as he thought it through. And a fresh idea came to him. He wanted to get from here to his memory, right? So where was the borderline between the two territories? The border of his memory must be marked by the things he almost remembered but couldn’t remember completely. If he could find his way to something he almost remembered but couldn’t quite bring back, then he knew he could find his way from there to the rest of it, the things he had forgotten completely or had blocked out.

What do I almost remember? he asked himself.

The answer came to him at once. The woman in the white blouse. The woman who had called him on the phone and tried to talk to him through the static. She was the one who had called him back from the brink of death, trying to reach him, trying to tell him something. He knew who she was—sort of—but he could not quite place her, could not quite call her identity to mind.

But he knew where to find her, didn’t he? He knew where to start at least. She had told him herself.

The office of the Sentinel in the basement of the school. He had written her address down on a piece of paper there. That was where the memory trail began. If he could find that address, he could find the woman in the white blouse. If he could find her, he knew somehow that he could find his way back to the rest of it, to everything.

Tom let out a long, unsteady sigh and opened his fist. His hand was empty. Lisa’s necklace was gone. He didn’t mind. He knew Lisa herself was still there, still nearby, sitting by his bed, praying for him, waiting for him.

You’re not alone, Tommy.

He looked up. Looked out the window. The fog was now rolling in across the far edges of the backyard. Already, the hedges that marked the Laughlins’ property had vanished beneath a pillowy whiteness. Already, Tom could see hulking, limping shadows moving in that whiteness. The malevolents. Coming back for him.

He stood up, the chair scraping the floor beneath him. He had to go. He had to find his memory, find the truth. He had to get to the school, to the Sentinel’s office.

And that meant he had to leave the house and go out into the fog.

16.

He felt the fear flare inside him as he moved down the hall to the stairs. But he felt something else, too: the old pulse of curiosity, the old fever for the answers. As he passed the front door, he glanced out the sidelight. He glimpsed the thickening sheets of mist covering the front lawn. Pretty frightening—but there was no point in dwelling on it. He turned away and dashed up the stairs, taking two at a time.

Into his bedroom. The baseball bat—the Louisville Slugger Warrior—was back in his closet, as if he’d never removed it. He reached in and felt the cool of the aluminum against his hand. It made him feel a little better to grip the bat and bring it out. He was going to need a weapon out there. The Warrior wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

He went to the computer table. Collected his phone and his keys. He started back to the bedroom door—and as he did, there was a soft sound behind him. A brief electronic sizzle, almost like a whisper. Tom stopped in his tracks. He knew where the sound was coming from. The computer. He glanced over his shoulder at it. The little whisper of sound came again, and at the same time there was the faintest hint of light in the depths of the monitor, the faintest appearance of a shape, a silhouetted figure.

Something was in there. Someone. Trying to get out. Trying to talk to him.

The Lying Man.

Tom stood where he was a moment. He was tempted to wait, tempted to listen. It was just that this place—his house, his empty house—was so lonely now. And he was afraid, afraid of going outside. The musical, soothing sound of the Lying Man’s voice would be some sort of company, some sort of comfort, even if it told him lies.

It cost Tom a measure of will to turn away, but he did turn away. Lies were of no use to him now. Before the computer could make another noise, he hurried out the door, carrying his baseball bat with him.

Back down the hall. Back down the stairs. Back to the front door. He pulled it open.

A heaviness came into his belly; a darkness came into his heart. The forward wall of the marine layer had now crept up over the edge of the driveway and was tumbling steadily toward him. He couldn’t see the malevolents in the depths of the whiteness yet, but he knew they were there. Close. Getting closer.

Here we go, he thought.

He stepped out of the house and pulled the door shut behind him.

His heart beat hard, and the fear coursed through him like blood as he headed up the driveway to the garage door. His mind was crowded with a thousand doubts and reconsiderations. What if Lisa was wrong? What if he should have stayed in the house and toughed it out? What if Marie was right and he needed to get to the monastery as quickly as he could? He wished Burt was around to help him figure out whom to trust, whom to believe.

He reached the garage door. Took a nervous glance over his shoulder to make sure none of the creatures were sneaking up on him. The main body of the fogbank was still down toward the end of the drive, though the mist up on the lawn was denser than it had been even a few minutes ago.

Taking a deep breath, he turned his back on the scene. He stooped down and grabbed the garage door handle and rolled the door upward.

Burt’s old yellow Mustang sat inside in the shadows. Tom moved to the driver’s door, unlocked it, and slipped in behind the wheel.

He moved fast, trying to outrun his doubts. He shut the door. Stowed the baseball bat on the passenger side, wedging it half upright between the seat and the door so he could grab it fast if he had to. He snapped on his seat belt. Worked the key into the ignition and switched the engine on. With a deep breath, he shifted to look out through the rear window. He backed out of the garage slowly, backed down the driveway slowly, rolling toward the wall of mist.

The car backed into the street—and the fog closed over it. Wrangling the Mustang’s transmission stick into Drive, Tom faced front. The white mass was plastered to the windshield, blotting out the view. He could barely see past the car’s hood. He turned on the wipers. They swiped away the condensation on the glass, making it clearer. He turned on the headlights. They carved out about three feet of visibility in front of his fenders. That was as good as it was going to get. He was going to have to take this slow.

He pressed the gas pedal down gingerly. The car started rolling forward at about fifteen miles an hour. Any faster than that and he’d be barreling blind through the fog. And yet every instinct he had urged him to go faster, to get through this mess, to get to the school, to get back indoors as quickly as possible. It took all his restraint to keep the Mustang’s speed under control.

Slowly—so slowly—he rolled down the street. His breath came shallow. His heart beat hard. He cast his eyes briefly to the right and left as he moved, peering through the fog to see what he could. Mostly: nothing. White on cloudy white. But now and then he thought he caught a hint, a shadow, a shape of—something. Was that the hovering outline of an oak tree? Was that the looming mass of the Willoughby house hunkering right by the curb at the corner? Yes. The mist shifted a little and he got a clearer look at the old place. All the windows in the house were dark. No one home. No one home anywhere. Tom knew he was all alone out here.

He looked ahead, out the windshield—and let out a gasp as a hulking figure appeared at the edge of his headlights’ glow. It vanished almost immediately back into the mist. Gone.

Tom took a few hard breaths, trying to steady himself. He could feel his palms sweating on the steering wheel. The Mustang rolled on—slowly, slowly. He reached the end of his street, where it met with Eucalyptus Road. That was the broad, straight, open avenue that led north to Highway 182, where the school was. The stop sign became visible just before he reached the intersection, but Tom was afraid to halt the car. He was afraid the malevolents would seize the opportunity, that they would come swarming out of the fog and surround him, block his car, break in and devour him. He knew they were out there, just waiting for their chance.

He went right past the stop sign without even slowing. Hey, let the police pull me over, he thought. Really, there was nothing in this world he would have liked better than to see a cop right now, traffic ticket and all!

He turned the Mustang onto Eucalyptus. On the wider street, the fog seemed to spread out and become a bit thinner. He lifted his eyes from the small patch of road directly in front of him and scanned the scene through the windshield. He could make out houses like shadows, and the low broad shape of the YMCA building, and the modest spire of the Hope Church where he and his mom went, and where Burt used to go, too. His eyes lingered for a moment on the church as he remembered those mornings when they had all sat together…

But then, something—a movement in the mist—caught his attention. He turned toward it.

There they were. Two—no, three—no, wait, four—limping shadows, hulking in the mist: one on a lawn, one in a driveway, one outside the Y, one by the curb. One, that last one, was close enough so that Tom could make him out clearly through the drifting marine layer. He could make out that bizarre and awful elongated face. He could see those red and hungry eyes. They watched him drive past. Once again, he had to fight the urge to hit the gas, to try to race away.

Keep it slow. Keep it steady. They can’t touch you if you’re in the car, if you’re on the move. If you make a run for it in this fog, you’ll crash, he told himself, and then they’ll have you.

He forced himself to focus forward, and he drove on.

The malevolents slipped away behind him. Now there was nothing again, nothing but the fog. Tom’s pulse began to slow. His breathing began to even out.

Then the radio started playing.

It was so startling he nearly jumped out of his seat. All at once, the digital display lit up and the car filled with the sound of static. The next moment the numbers on the display started to change, climb. The radio was scanning, looking for a channel. As the numbers on the readout shifted rapidly, the whisper of white noise wavered and dimmed. For a second, Tom heard a snippet of music, a note or two. Then it was gone. The next second he heard a weatherman’s voice: “No break in the dense…” Then that, too, disappeared into the static as the readout numbers continued to roll on.

The next sound, though… the next sound distressed him. Just for a moment, dimly under the white whisper, Tom heard a woman weeping, sobbing.

Was that his mom? Was that his mom crying for him?

Before he could be sure, the noise was gone. There was another snippet of music under the hiss of static. It sounded like a rock band performing in the belly of a giant snake. Then that music, too, dissolved.

Enough, Tom thought.

He reached out to the Off button and pushed it. It had no effect. The radio kept scanning. The static went on. Holding the steering wheel with one hand, Tom tried to hit the button again.

And a voice spoke to him out of the radio with shocking clarity, “Don’t touch that dial, Tom.”

He knew at once it was the Lying Man. He recognized the calm, lilting, hypnotic voice. He hit the Off button again—harder—and then again. No change. The readout stayed lit.

The Lying Man said, “No, no, no, Tom. That’s no use. I’m with you. Whatever you do. I’m always with you.”

Tom had to watch the windshield to keep from running off the road. He took his hand away from the radio, put it back on the steering wheel.

“Did you think I would abandon you?” the mellow voice continued. “I would never do that. I’m here for you, Tom, even when you try to escape me. I’m not only traveling with you—I’m waiting for you wherever you go. Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive. Me and all my friends. You can’t get away from us. Ever.”

There was a flash of movement at the corner of Tom’s eyes. He turned to the side window just in time to see another malevolent limp off into the mist. He tried to swallow, but his throat had gone dry. His neck and back and sides, on the other hand, were pouring clammy sweat.

“It’s just like Lisa told you,” said the Lying Man. “You’re not alone.”

“What do you want?” Tom said hoarsely. The Mustang continued its slow passage through the deep mist.

“Oh, it’s not about what I want,” said the Lying Man with a sound of gentle sympathy and concern. “It’s about what you want, Tom. That’s what I’m here for. For you. It’s all about you.”

“I just want to find out the truth,” Tom said tersely.

“Well, then that’s what I want, too,” said the serene voice from the radio. “I want you to find out the truth also. The truth about yourself. About what you’re really like. About what your life is really like. And about what you really want more than anything.”

The sweat poured off Tom even harder. He shivered with the clammy cold of it. His shirt clung to his skin.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I think you do,” said the Lying Man. “I think you know deep down. I just think you need a little help to figure it out. I think you need my help before you can really face the truth.”

Tom glanced at the radio. He sneered. “I know you,” he said, his voice trembling. “I know what you’re like now. You lied to me. You’re nothing but lies. You’re…”

At that moment, with a horrible thud, something—someone—smashed into his fender.

Without thinking, Tom hit the brakes. The tires squealed as the Mustang skidded to a stop. Tom shouted in fear as a figure tumbled out of the fog and collapsed over the side of the Mustang’s hood. At first, he thought it must be a malevolent. But it wasn’t. It was a man.

Sprawled over the front of the car, the man looked up through the windshield, looked at Tom desperately. His forehead was streaked with blood. His eyes were wide and shining with a sick brightness. His expression was one of terror.

Shocked, Tom realized he knew the man. He recognized him. It was the lanky, long-haired young guy from the heavenly garden. The man with the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, the addict he’d seen on television lying in the hospital bed next to his.

Slowly, the man raised one hand, his wrist bandaged. He reached out desperately as if trying to touch Tom’s face through the windshield glass.

Then, in the very next second, before Tom could react, two of the hungry-eyed malevolents lunged out of the surrounding whiteness and seized the man in their poisonous hands. The man shrieked in terror as the creatures’ long claws dug into the flesh of his arms. He shrieked again as, gibbering, the malevolents dragged him off the car’s hood. The man went on screaming and screaming, but it was no use. With wild cries of triumph, the creatures hauled him away into the mist.

The calm voice on the radio gave a warm laugh. “Now there’s a man who finally got what he wanted,” he said.

Openmouthed, Tom stared out the windshield at the place where the long-haired man had been. The whole awful scene had happened in an instant, and another instant passed before Tom could break through his horror and amazement and act. Then, quickly, he reached for the baseball bat next to the seat beside him. He had to do something. He had to… what? He didn’t know. Would he go out there? Try to fight the monsters? Try to save the man? What chance did he have?

It didn’t matter. He had to try. He wrapped his fingers around the Warrior and turned back to the windshield, grabbing hold of the door handle with his other hand, ready to leap out.

But it was already too late. The fog swirled and tumbled past the Mustang’s windows, deep and thick and empty. The long-haired man had vanished. And what Tom saw next filled his whole body with an acid fear.

The malevolents. They were coming for him. They were everywhere.

17.

His car had been stopped too long. The monsters had spotted him. They were swarming around him now, hunched figures limping and hunkering toward him out of the mist, becoming visible on every side of the Mustang, at every window.

There were two right in front of him, their raw, hideous, misshapen faces caught in the out-glow of his headlights. They were approaching the hood of his car, their arms raised for attack, their clawed fingers reaching. There were more of them to his left, out the driver’s window. Three more hungry-eyed beasts slouching out of the drifting whiteness, closing on him. Two more to his right, coming toward the passenger window. And when he looked up into his rearview mirror, he saw the lumbering figures coming up behind him, too.

He was surrounded. There was no way past them.

“I told you, Tom,” the Lying Man said quietly over the radio. “You’re never alone.”

Tom’s muscles had gone weak with terror. Second after second as the creatures closed in on him, as they limped closer and closer toward the car from every side, he sat behind the wheel frozen, unable to will himself to move. The monsters in front of him reached his fenders. Their claws were on his car, scraping horribly against the metal. They were beginning to climb up onto the hood, making the Mustang rock. Tom’s heart pounded as one of the malevolents reached his door. He heard its claws scraping at the door’s handle. And now another one started pounding at the passenger window, trying to break through the glass. And the car rocked even harder as yet another of the things started to climb onto the trunk in back.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Tom,” said the Lying Man. “Soon you and I will be together forever.”

Tom let out a roar and hit the gas. The Mustang’s tires squealed and the car shot forward. The monsters on the hood went flying off to either side. For another second—and then another—Tom saw the creatures at the windows running alongside him, hanging on to the doors, trying to keep him from getting away. But the car kept racing forward. The malevolents lost their grip and tumbled off into the mist. Tom kept roaring, kept the gas pedal pressed down hard beneath his sneaker.

The car broke out of the closing circle of creatures and shot away. Tom was free—free but blind because now the mist was thick again, tight against the windows again, and the car was speeding, speeding through a swirling, cottony mass in which he could see nothing.

Moving so blindly at such a speed, Tom quickly lost his sense of direction. He didn’t know where the road was. He didn’t know where he was going.

There was one more giddy second of racing blindness. Then the Mustang hit the curb, bounced up over the sidewalk, and smashed into a tree.

The car stopped. The engine died. The fog closed in around him.

18.

In that first moment of impact, there was a crunch of metal, a clatter of shattering plastic, a tinkle of breaking glass. The left side of the fender collapsed as it smacked into the tree trunk. The left headlight disintegrated. The jolt threw Tom forward against the seat belt, and the belt threw him back against the seat. He was dazed for a moment—but only for a moment. He willed his mind clear. There was no time to waste.

The malevolents would catch up to him in seconds. With the car dead, he’d have no chance to escape.

He grabbed the ignition key, wrenched it over, trying to start the car again. The engine wheezed and coughed but wouldn’t catch. He could see smoke beginning to pour up from beneath the hood. No, it was no good. The Mustang was finished.

Time to go.

He grabbed the baseball bat. Yanked it out of its space by the door. He glanced through his window to see if the path was clear. He saw the malevolents, dim in the thick fog, but getting clearer every second as they came humping after him.

Moving with the speed of panic, Tom pressed the button to release his seat belt. He grabbed the door handle. Pushed the door open. Dragging the Warrior with him, he tumbled out into the mist.

The cold, damp air closed over him, chilling his cold, damp skin. But it wasn’t just the air that chilled him. It was the beasts. So near. He could see their dark shapes. He could hear the brusque grunts of their breathing, the shuffling rhythm of their oncoming footsteps. Without the car around him, he felt totally vulnerable—he was totally vulnerable. He had to get out of here. Now.

He’d lost his sense of direction. He wasn’t sure where he was. He wasn’t sure which way to go. But the monsters were closing in to the left of him, so he turned to the right, made his way around the fender of the car, and headed into the white murk.

The fog embraced him. Moving blindly, he half ran, half staggered forward. Guessing the direction, he tried to angle his way back to the road. He got it right. A few steps and he stumbled over the curb—nearly tripped, nearly went down, but was then running over the open asphalt with the mist drifting by his face.

He felt afraid. Worse than afraid. He felt hopeless. The fog was everywhere. The creatures were everywhere. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t see where he was going. How could he ever expect to escape?

The voice of the Lying Man played in his head.

I’m waiting for you wherever you go. Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive. Me and all my friends. You can’t get away from us.

Maybe he was right, Tom thought. Maybe going to the school was a mistake. Or maybe the Lying Man was just trying to scare him, to keep him away from the place where his memory was, where the truth was.

Yes, Tom thought. Yes, that was it. The Lying Man would say anything to keep him from finding out the truth, to keep him from…

His thoughts were cut off by a high, hollow, echoing shriek as a malevolent lunged out of the fog, reaching for him.

Tom screamed and twisted away. He felt the thing’s claws slice through his sleeve and nick his shoulder. He felt darkness swim up through his mind at the poisonous contact. He staggered back, nauseous, unsteady. The malevolent recovered its balance, turned, preparing to lunge again. Tom braced himself. He grabbed the Warrior bat in both hands. He pulled it back over his shoulders.

With another awful shriek, the malevolent rushed at him again, its distorted features careering toward him out of the fog.

Tom swung with all his might, swung for the fences.

The bat connected—but it wasn’t a good hit. The creature was too close. It jammed him. The thinner midsection of the bat struck the beast on the arm. The impact wasn’t solid enough to knock it down. But the thing did stagger a few steps to the side. That gave Tom the chance to dance away from it, stepping back quickly out of its reach.

He almost bumped into the malevolent right behind him. Fortunately, the thing let out an eager, hungry shriek and Tom heard it. He spun around—just in time—the beast was nearly on him. It was lurching forward, its eyes gleaming, its dagger-like claws extended toward his face.

There was no time for Tom to bring the bat around again, so he jabbed with the head of it. It hit the malevolent in the throat. The creature gagged, and a nauseating green slime came out of its mouth as it tumbled over, clutching at its own neck. It fell to the pavement, writhing and choking and spitting.

Tom didn’t pause to watch. He knew the first beast was coming after him. He turned—and there it was, nearly on top of him. And here came the others, an army of hulking shadows limping toward him out of the swirling white.

The closest creature gave a high-pitched snarl, its sunken nostrils flaring at the scent of him, its eyes bright with hunger.

Tom heard Lisa’s voice as if she were whispering into his ear: The doctors say if they lose you again, if your heart stops beating again, they doubt they’ll be able to revive you. They doubt you’ll be strong enough to make it back.

He didn’t hesitate. He cocked the bat again and swung full force. There was a sickening thud as he made home-run contact with the nearest creature’s head.

What happened next was too disgusting to describe. Even the howl the creature made was so awful that Tom, hearing it, felt as if his blood had turned to ice. In the next second, what was left of the malevolent was writhing at Tom’s feet, transforming, smoking, boiling and bubbling into a hideous goo.

Tom took one second to gape at the mess where the creature had been. But that was all the time he had. The rest of them were closing in fast; the one in the lead was so near that Tom could see its burning eyes and the white flash of its sharp teeth.

He turned. He saw the other monster—the one he’d hit in the throat—lying in his path. It was also starting to smoke and melt, its substance bubbling and dissolving into the pavement.

Tom took a long step and leapt over the thing where it lay.

He ran.

19.

He ran—and the mist surrounded him. It chilled him and turned his sweat cold and clammy. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see two feet ahead of himself. With each step he expected one of the beasts to loom suddenly out of the whiteness in front of him. Now and then, as he raced on blindly, he caught a glimpse of the things hunched and skulking in the depths of the white. They were keeping pace with him, tracking him, waiting for him to get tired, waiting for him to stop and rest so they could close in for the kill.

And he was getting tired. He was already out of breath. His legs were beginning to ache. His lungs were burning. His speed was beginning to dwindle away. He couldn’t keep this pace up much longer. He needed to rest.

He dared to take a look back over his shoulder now. Nothing but whiteness. He looked forward. Whiteness. He glanced to the right and the left. White and white. Maybe he’d lost them. Maybe he could pause for just a moment…

He slowed to a jog. He slowed to a walk. Almost at once, he heard a bizarre, echoing squeal right behind him. He spun to look, panting.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

The fog was suddenly full of them. So many. A whole army, it looked like. Close and moving in. He could hear the harsh snorts of their breathing. He could hear the whisper of their shuffling footsteps. He could see them slumping closer and closer, their forms becoming clearer and clearer as they moved in on him step by slow step.

Just then he heard something new. A soft whisper. A gentle rattling noise above his head.

It was the wind. Now he could feel it. The wind was lifting, stirring the leaves on the trees. The fog began to move and shift with the current of it. Tom began to hope: maybe…

He looked around. Yes, there, in the direction he’d been running: the mist was growing thinner.

The wind continued to blow. The mist continued to disperse. Slowly, something new was becoming visible in the whiteness.

What was it? He wasn’t sure at first. Just a cluster of strange shapes and shadows. He couldn’t figure out what they were. But there was no time to think about it. The malevolents were closing in, dozens of them. Another few seconds and they’d be on him. They’d tear him to pieces. He had to go toward where the fog was parting.

Even with death so near, he had to force his weary legs to move. Ignoring the ache of his muscles, ignoring the burning sensation in his lungs, he started running again.

The wind grew stronger. The fog tumbled dizzyingly around him, leaving him disoriented, off-balance. Still, he managed to stumble toward those bizarre shapes in front of him. They started to become clearer. Now he began to see them through the mist. Was it possible they were… ? Yes…

Tom felt the hope swell inside him. With his last reserves of energy, he put on an extra burst of speed. The fog continued to thin around him as the wind grew stronger. He ran—and finally, the great mass of mist parted, parted as if a pair of huge hands had seized it on either side and pulled it open like curtains. The edges of white drew apart, threads and tendrils lingering between them. And then even the tendrils blew away and the scene was revealed.

He was in the playground. He had stumbled into the playground of the lower school. It was a sandy pit filled with equipment and structures. Those weird shapes he’d seen—they were the climbing frame, the slide, the crawling tube, the seesaw, and the carousel. Once the fog was peeled away from them, their colorful plastic shapes weren’t strange to him at all. He passed this playground on the way to school every day. He knew it well. He’d played here as a little kid.

Quickly, Tom looked around. The wind had blown the fog back from the edges of the sandpit. It was as if an invisible barrier was holding the mist at bay. Tom could still see the monsters in the whiteness behind him. He could still hear them shuffling and grunting. But they couldn’t come any closer. They couldn’t breach the fog to enter the clearer playground. They drifted back and forth in the mist in hungry frustration.

He was safe. For the moment.

Exhausted, gasping for breath, weak with relief, Tom felt his knees go wobbly under him. The Warrior bat dropped from his trembling fingers, making a metallic sound as it hit the sand. He staggered and had to grab hold of the climbing frame’s post to keep himself up. His eyes lifted and he saw—he almost couldn’t believe it—he saw the sky! The blue sky made pale by the last thin layer of mist. Could it be that the fog was clearing?

It was. He leaned on the frame and peered off into the distance. The wind continued to stir and the fog continued to blow away from before him.

And now, like a magic city emerging from the clouds, a welcome and familiar scene appeared. A grassy hill. A winding asphalt path along the top of the slope. And at the peak: the school, his school, Springland High.

He was almost there!

Tom would never have thought he could be so glad to see the place. The school was not exactly a crystal fairytale palace to look at. Just a sprawling one-story structure of brick, metal, and glass. It was a building Tom came to almost every day. He had become so used to the sight of it that he hardly noticed it at all most of the time. If you had asked him, he would have had to think for a minute before he could say what it looked like. But he noticed it now, all right. He saw it clearly. And what it looked like to him was a refuge, a place to hide, a place to get away from the army of murderous creatures behind him and begin to find the answers he so desperately needed. The woman in the white blouse. The address he’d scribbled down and left in the office of the Sentinel. The path back into his memory and the secret of what was keeping him in this coma, so close to death.

He had to get up that hill. He had to hurry, too. He did not know how long the wind would continue blowing, how long the fog would hold off.

He pushed wearily away from the climbing frame until he was standing on his own. He looked back into the mist out of which he’d come.

The malevolents were still there, still milling along the edges of the marine layer. They snarled and pawed at the churning whiteness as if hoping to break through into the clear. But they couldn’t do it.

Tom turned away from them, turned back toward the school. The wind continued to blow, making a path for him through the mist, a clear path up the hill. He took a step toward it.

Remember the Warrior.

Right. He’d nearly forgotten. He bent down and picked the baseball bat up out of the sand. Then, gripping the Warrior in one hand, he started moving. He trudged over the playground sand to the edge of the grass. He started up the hill.

It was slow going. His legs were so tired from running. He was still out of breath. Even this small climb was an effort. His shoulders slumped, the bat bumping over the sod behind him, he trudged upward.

He was just about halfway to the top when there was a new noise. A dark rumble inside the rising rush of the wind. Thunder. Tom felt a fresh twinge of anxiety. The last time it had started to rain, the monsters had gotten him. He couldn’t let that happen again.

He paused. The cold air rushed over him. He could feel the storm coming. He looked back down the hill. The pillowy whiteness of the fog was on the move again. It was beginning to roil with the wind. It was starting to roll forward, over the edges of the playground where Tom had just been. Even as he stood there watching, the climbing frame began to fade and grow dim, then the seesaw…

The fog was coming after him. And with the fog came the malevolents. Tom could see them moving into the playground, limping amid the equipment, searching for him.

Another low rumble of thunder. No time to waste. He faced forward again, up the hill, toward the school. But before he started moving, he saw something that made him pull up short. Something inside the school. Something alive.

There was a long line of windows in the front of the school. They were tall, the panes starting just off the ground and rising to about shoulder height. The lights were off inside the building and the windows were dark. But as Tom looked, he was almost sure he saw a slow movement behind the unlit glass.

Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive.

Tom shuddered at the memory of the Lying Man’s promise—or was it a threat? Were the Lying Man and the creatures he controlled already ahead of him? Were they already waiting for him inside the building?

He swallowed. He glanced back over his shoulder. The wind continued to blow and the fog continued rolling toward him up the hill. Already, most of the playground equipment had disappeared in the whiteness. Already, the first of the malevolents were limping toward the bottom of the slope.

Tom had no choice. He had come this far. There was nowhere to go but forward.

He began to climb the hill again. He neared the school slowly. He reached the path at the top of the slope. Just as he did, another movement at one of the school’s windows caught his eye.

This time it was unmistakable. A figure was emerging from the darkness inside the school. It was approaching the window.

The thunder rolled. The wind blew. The fog rolled toward him up the hill.

The figure inside the school became clearer—and even more clear. It pressed itself against the glass and looked out at him.

“Gordon?” said Tom out loud—but his voice was lost in a fresh rumble of thunder.

It was. It was Gordon. The Tigers football star stood for a moment, pressed to the window. He peered out at Tom with a strangely empty expression on his face. Slowly, he lifted his hand in greeting.

But before Tom could respond, the thunder rolled again like dark laughter. There was a first flash of lightning. And Gordon drew back into the darkness of the school’s interior and vanished like a ghost.

There came a nightmare day. A Wednesday afternoon. The last class period but one. For Tom, that meant PE. He and ten other guys doing gymnastics, climbing ropes in the gym, working on the horse and the beams and the mats and so on. When the class was over, the guys headed into the locker room. They showered. They got back into their street clothes. Tom was standing in front of his locker, buttoning his shirt, when he felt that something was wrong.

He looked up. Looked around him. Where was everyone? Somehow, while he was concentrating on getting dressed, all the other guys had quietly slipped out of the locker room. The place was empty. He was alone.

Alone—and then not alone. The locker room door opened and three guys came in. Not just any three guys. Three Tigers. Big Tigers, too—jumbo size—from the defensive line: Matt Halliwell, Hank Thatcher, and Dub Simpson.

As Tom stood staring, they moved in on him. They stood around him in a semicircle. Tom’s back was against his gym locker. There was nowhere for him to run.

Tom’s fingers were still fiddling with the last button on his shirt. He didn’t even have his sneakers back on yet. He was in his socks. He realized this must’ve been part of some kind of plan: the other guys slipping out, leaving him alone; the three football players converging on him. His mind raced, trying to think of an escape strategy. He came up with nothing. He felt just about as helpless as it was possible to feel. If these guys wanted to rough him up, he was going to get majorly roughed.

Matt Halliwell spoke first. Broad-shouldered, fat-faced, flat-faced, with black hair so short it looked like iron filings standing up on top of a magnet. He put a finger the size of a sausage against Tom’s chest. Poked him hard.

“Nice story you wrote about us, wimp,” he said.

Dub Simpson, shaped like a cinder block and about as smart as a cinder block, shoved Tom’s shoulder with his open palm.

“What’d you have to do that for?” he said.

Tom’s eyes flashed from Matt to Dub—and then to Hank Thatcher. Hank looked away, frowning. What a weird situation this was! Hank was one of the sources for Tom’s story. Hank had been a benchwarmer on the championship team three years before. He had seen the players taking drugs himself. He had pictures of them and e-mails from them proving it. He had met Tom in a parking garage one dark night. Handed the evidence over in a rolled-up manila envelope. But he had given Tom that information on the condition of anonymity. Tom had promised never to reveal his name. And now Hank, to protect his secret from his teammates, was joining with the others in taking vengeance on him—and Tom was bound by his promise to keep his mouth shut about it. If this was irony, then irony stank.

“You should’ve kept your stupid opinions to yourself,” said Matt, poking him in the chest again.

“Nobody asked you what you thought,” said Dub.

“It’s not what I thought,” Tom said. He figured, well, if he was going to get a beat-down, he wasn’t going to whine about it. He was going to say his piece at least, while he still had his teeth. “It has nothing to do with my opinions. You think I don’t like the team? I love the team. My brother played on the team. I didn’t want to write this story. I had to. Because it was true.”

Dub somehow wasn’t interested in hearing about the responsibilities of the press. “They say they may take our championship away,” he complained, sticking out his jaw angrily.

Yeah, because you didn’t earn it fairly! Tom thought. But he didn’t say that out loud. No sense pushing things too far. What he did say was, “Well, look, man, I’m really sorry, but like I said, I’m a news guy, I have to…”

“Sorry?” And this time Matt poked him so hard it made him step back into his locker with a clang. “What good does sorry do us now? You’re supposed to be loyal to the school, man! You’re supposed to stand with the team.”

Tom could see this was about to get ugly. He could see that Matt was working himself up to do violence and that Dub was already on the brink—Dub was pretty much always on the brink. And Hank was not going to do a thing to stop either of them because that would give him away.

But just as Tom was wondering how he was going to explain his broken bones to his mother, the locker room door opened again and in came Gordon Thomas.

One of the secret truths of the world, Tom had sometimes noticed, was that life is unfair and that some people get all the luck. This truth was so harsh that many adults couldn’t face up to it. But a kid only had to step out onto a playground once to understand: some people are born smarter, some faster, some stronger, some simply cooler than the rest. Parents and teachers worked hard to convince kids that everyone was special, but kids could see for themselves it wasn’t so—otherwise, the word special wouldn’t mean anything. Every soul was important, sure—a unique work of creation—but when it came to the gifts of nature, most people were kind of ordinary. Only special people were special.

Gordon Thomas was one of those special people. He was handsome with chiseled features and reddish-blond hair that fell rakishly into his startlingly pale blue eyes. Fast and strong? Check. No one had ever beaten him in a race. No one ever tried to beat him in a fight. He was even smart—maybe not as smart as some of the geeks in school, but he always paid attention in class, always did his homework, and always got good grades. And as for being cool, it just came naturally to him. For all his gifts, he wasn’t arrogant or stuck-up. For all his physical strength, he never bullied anyone. For all his success, he always acted modestly and treated people decently. So you couldn’t even hate the guy!

And Tom didn’t hate him. He envied him sometimes. But he liked him. Everyone liked him.

Gordon came into the locker room fast now, and he looked angry. Quickly, he shoved his way past Matt and muscled in between him and Tom, shielding Tom from the others with his body.

“What d’you guys think you’re doing?” Gordon asked them. He looked at each in turn: Matt, Hank, Dub. All three of them averted their eyes, shamefaced in front of the quarterback. “What, are the Tigers beating guys up now? Are we thugs all of a sudden?”

“We’re just talking to him,” Matt muttered.

“Oh yeah,” said Gordon. “I can see.”

The three linemen looked at their shoes, ashamed.

“Coach says they may take our trophy away,” said Dub. “It’s not fair.”

“It’s not fair?” said Gordon, staring hard at the cinder block. “How is it not fair? It wasn’t fair when our guys took drugs to win. That wasn’t fair to the Sandy Hill Panthers, who should’ve gotten the trophy in the first place. All Tom did was tell the truth about it. How is that not fair?”

Dub blinked stupidly. Dub did that a lot. “He wasn’t loyal to the team,” he grumbled.

“Well, maybe he was loyal to something bigger than the team,” said Gordon—though even he sounded miserable about it. “It’s his job to tell the truth even when he doesn’t like it. Maybe especially when he doesn’t like it. He was loyal to that.”

“We just wanted to make him understand what he did to us,” said Matt.

“I know what you just wanted to do,” Gordon said. “But the facts don’t go away just because you beat up the guy who tells them. That just makes you as bad as the guys who took the dope. You want the trophy back?”

“Yeah!” said Dub.

“Well, then let’s win it back,” Gordon said quietly. “If we do it right, we don’t have to be afraid of what anyone says.”

Dub blinked stupidly some more, but even he seemed to grasp this concept. Sort of.

“Now get out of here,” said the quarterback. “Leave Tom alone. He didn’t do anything wrong. And anyone who messes with him, messes with me.”

That was Gordon—typical Gordon. And that was why, when all the players had gone, when Gordon was gone and Tom was alone in the locker room again, he sank down slowly onto one of the benches.

Because he felt bad—really bad. It was true he hadn’t written the story about the team because he hated the team or because he was envious of Gordon, and he hadn’t done it to impress Marie. He had written the story because it was the truth and telling the truth was something he did, something he felt the need to do. But whatever his motives had been, the results had been the same: he’d gotten the team in trouble and hurt Gordon and won Marie’s admiration. It made Tom feel guilty, as if those had been his motives after all.

He especially felt guilty when he was hanging out with Marie. And he was hanging out with her more and more now. The very next weekend, the next Sunday afternoon, he was at her house after church. He joined her and her father and mother and brother for lunch.

The Cameron mansion was even more impressive inside than outside. When Tom stepped through the front door, he came into a vast foyer with marble floors and a sweeping staircase rising to a second-floor balcony. In the study, where he sat with Marie before lunch was served, there were photographs everywhere. Dr. Cameron shaking hands with the mayor. Dr. Cameron with his arm around the governor’s shoulder. Dr. Cameron laughing with the owner of the Dodgers. Dr. Cameron with just about every famous person who lived anywhere near town.

When it was time to eat, they all sat in a vast dining room with a wall of glass doors that looked out across the hillside at the sparkling Pacific Ocean. Dr. Cameron sat at one end of the long glass table and Mrs. Cameron at the other. Marie’s brother, Carl, was on one side, and Marie and Tom sat next to each other across from him. The room was bright with sunlight. The light hit the prisms in the chandelier and was turned into rainbows and the rainbows fell on the crystal goblets and the china plates and the hand-carved oak sideboard against the wall. Tom felt as if he had stepped into a world so plush and beautiful as to have an aura of magic.

Dr. Cameron lifted a glass of orange juice in a toast to him. He was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered man with a face as perfect as his daughter’s, his hair a silvery blond. “Marie has told us so much about you, Tom,” he said with a smile. He had a calm, reassuring voice—a good voice for a doctor, Tom thought. “We’re really glad to know we’ll be seeing more of you around here in the future.”

Tom was glad to know this, too—it was the first he’d heard of it! But Marie seemed to agree. She smiled in that way that made Tom ache.

It was a wonderful lunch. Tom talked about his work at the newspaper. He talked about his story, the one about the football team, and how he was working on new leads. Instead of being angry at him, Marie and her family admired him. It was a nice change from being at school.

After lunch, Marie walked him over the broad front lawn of her house to where Tom’s Mustang was parked at the curb.

“Daddy really likes you,” she said. She took hold of his arm as they reached the car. She pressed close to him. “That’s a really good thing, you know. He’s the best guy in the world. And he knows a lot of important people—all the important people around here, for sure! He can be a really good friend to you, Tom, when you’re applying to colleges or looking for a job, all that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, he seems like a really good guy,” Tom said. And he thought he could probably use some help applying to colleges now that the principal and all his teachers hated him.

They reached his car. Tom turned to look at her. He wanted to ask her about Gordon then. He wanted to make sure everything was over between them, that there would be no hard feelings about him moving in on Gordon’s girl or anything like that. But he didn’t say a word. With Marie holding his arm and looking up at him the way she was, he didn’t want to do anything that might ruin the moment.

He was still trying to convince himself to speak when Marie suddenly moved in even closer and kissed him.

At which point Tom completely forgot about Gordon Thomas, and about everything.

20.

Urged on by the wind and thunder, Tom hurried over the last yards of the hill to the school’s front door. The door was made of glass and was dark, like the windows. As he approached it, he thought he saw another figure within, but it was only his own reflection. It was the first time he’d seen himself since he left the house. He was shocked by his expression of wild-eyed panic. With the baseball bat gripped in his fist, he looked like some sort of madman ready to bust up the world.

The wind blew harder, with a hollow roar like the sea’s. It carried the first drops of rain in it. Tom felt them on his neck and cheeks. He tried the door. It was locked. He rattled it, but it wouldn’t budge. There was a fresh grumble of thunder. It sounded—weirdly—like the low laughter of the Lying Man. Tom looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see the man himself standing right there behind him. What he saw was almost as scary: the first tendrils of mist were swirling up the hill after him. The fog—and the malevolents within it—were on their way.

He rattled the school door again.

“Gordon?” he shouted. “Are you in there? Let me in! I need to get in!”

There was no answer.

“Gordon!”

An electric crackle made Tom stiffen. White light flashed around him, making his image on the glass door transparent and phantom-like. Lightning. The storm was beginning again. He didn’t want to be exposed out here when it struck. He had to get inside fast.

He stepped back from the door. He lifted the Louisville Slugger in his two hands.

Well, he thought, since I’m inside my own mind, I guess this isn’t a crime.

He jabbed the head of the bat at the glass door. Then he did it again. That second time did the trick. With a loud crack, a triangle of glass broke away from the rest of the pane. The shard fell into the school and Tom heard it shatter on the floor in there. He reached through the hole, hoping to find a latch, but the door had a key lock. There was no way to undo it. So, as the thunder rolled again—the thunder that sounded like eerie laughter—Tom worked quickly, jabbing through the glass of the door with his bat head again and again, breaking off piece after piece, clearing a larger and larger hole for himself.

The thunder subsided then, but the wind rose. Tom took one last look behind him. The mist was creeping up the hill, advancing quickly with a slithering motion back and forth across the grass. The air was now laced with thin rain. Tom turned and, stooping low to keep from getting cut, stepped through the hole he’d made in the door and entered the school.

At first there was the noise of glass crunching under his sneakers. But as he moved away from the litter on the floor, the noise stopped and a deep quiet surrounded him, broken only by the steady sough of the wind through the broken door. He was in the school’s front lobby, a place he saw almost every day. A broad, open hall decorated with bulletin boards and posters and signs. “Spring Comes to Springland” read a banner in one display case. There were various poems and works of art taped up inside. There were posters for school shows nearby and sign-up sheets for clubs and programs. And there was a trophy case displaying plaques and prizes the school had won: top test scores in the county, winner of a state essay contest—and, of course, the trophy for the state football championship, the one now under investigation because of Tom’s story.

Two corridors ran off from the lobby, one on either side of him. The halls were dark, sunk in shadow. Peering into the gloom, he could make out rows of lockers on the corridor walls, their bright green paint muted in the dim light. At first glance, the halls looked empty. But as Tom paused there for a moment, peering down the corridor to his right, he suddenly saw something. He caught his breath. There had been a swift movement in the shadowy reaches at the end. Someone crossing the hall from one side to the other. A moment later Tom heard a door swing shut down there.

“Gordon?” he called.

But there was no answer. No sound at all except the wind through the broken door. The wind that sounded like a whisper.

And then there was a whisper: “Tom.”

Startled, Tom wheeled around. That sounded like Lisa. Yes! There she was. Or at least he thought he could make her out standing in the shadows down the other hall, down by the principal’s office. Just standing there, watching him.

“Lisa?” he said softly, his throat dry. This place was really beginning to spook him.

The figure didn’t move, didn’t answer. Just stood there, watching him. Creepy. Very.

He started walking toward her slowly. “Lisa?” he said again—though he could barely get the word out now. “Is that you?”

Still, the figure stood motionless. As Tom got closer, the shadows seemed to gather around her. Her shape seemed to blend in with their darkness. As he came even closer, he saw that the darkness was all there was. Lisa had faded away like a mirage, vanishing so smoothly into the shadows that Tom couldn’t be sure she had ever been there at all.

He reached the spot where Lisa had been—or where he thought she’d been—about halfway down the hall. It gave him a very eerie feeling to find the place empty.

He was right outside the principal’s office now. There was a large pane of glass here. Usually, on a school day, you could look right through the glass and see the outer office where the principal’s two assistants worked. But today the glass was completely—weirdly—black. Nothing was visible through it. Nothing at all.

Just then, from behind him—through the glass door he himself had broken—there came a rattling crash of thunder. Lightning flashed almost simultaneously. The electric glow flickered over Tom where he stood—and in that momentary light, Tom caught a glimpse of someone standing on the other side of the principal’s window, looking out at him.

Tom gasped—and then his breath came out of him unsteadily. He recognized that half-seen face. It was the Lying Man.

I’m not only traveling with you—I’m waiting for you wherever you go.

“Tom! This way! Hurry!”

With another start, Tom turned toward the whisper. It sounded like Lisa again. And again, there she was—or the ghost of her—standing still and dim in the hall’s far shadows.

He took another glance at the principal’s window, but it was black again. If the Lying Man was in there, Tom couldn’t see him. All the same, he was glad to get away from that place. He moved down the hall toward the figure of Lisa, calling out to her as he went.

“Lisa, is that you? Wait for me.”

But she didn’t answer him. She stood eerily silent. And eerily, she did the mirage thing again, fading away into the shadows before he could reach her.

Tom’s heart was rabbiting inside him. He felt like he was in a haunted house. A school full of phantoms. It was almost more frightening than the fog full of monsters. And the thunder and lightning outside didn’t help any either.

“Tommeeee.”

Lisa’s ghostly whisper drifted to him again, but this time when he looked into the dark, he couldn’t see her.

“Tommmeeeeee.”

He moved toward the sound. He reached the end of the hallway. There were stairs there, a broad flight going down into the basement.

“Tommmeee.”

That’s where her voice was coming from.

Was she trying to get him to come down to the Sentinel’s office? To get the address he’d left there, the address of the woman in the white blouse? But why haunt him like this? That’s where he was headed anyway.

“Tommy, come down,” she whispered from the darkness below.

This was just plain creepy now. It reminded him of the time he’d met Hank in the parking garage. He didn’t know what he was walking into.

“Come down, Tommy.”

He had to do it. He had to get that address. He had to find the woman in the white blouse. He had to remember what he had forgotten—who shot him and why—if he was ever going to get out of his coma. If he was ever going to learn the truth. If he was ever going to make it home alive.

Tom heard the low thunder outside—or was it just the Lying Man’s laughter? He knew there was no going back—not for him, not with the need to know that beat inside him like his own pulse. He had to move.

He started down the stairs. Every nerve in him seemed to be standing on edge. He was listening for any noise, any threat. He reached the bottom and stepped down into yet another dark corridor. He paused, staring into the deep shadows, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

“Tommeee.”

He held his breath. Lisa’s whisper. And wait… someone else now.

“…just for a little while…”

Who was that? He wasn’t sure.

“I don’t like it…” Yet a third voice, a third whisper.

And then more:

“This way, Tom.”

“Go to the monastery.”

“Why did you do it?”

“…ruin everything…”

Tom finally breathed out, quivering. The corridor was full of whispers, full of ghostly voices.

“He’s not your friend.”

“The monastery.”

“This way, Tommy.”

As Tom stared, he thought he saw movements in the shadows, but the fleeting figures were so faint he wasn’t sure they were really there.

Clutching his baseball bat in one hand, he started to edge forward—moving with slow care, barely lifting his feet as he shuffled along.

“Go to the monastery.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It’s just for a little while.”

“This way.”

Tom moved deeper down the hall, deeper into the darkness. He felt a breath of air on his face as something rushed past him. But when he turned to look—nothing—there was nothing there. Only the whispers.

“Tommmeee.”

“He’s not your friend…”

There was another movement. And another. Each time, when Tom looked, there was no one, nothing. And yet the whispers went on as he shuffled slowly forward. It was so bizarre that words finally burst out of him: “Is anyone there? Is anyone… ?”

For a moment after he spoke, there was silence. Then—something new. A snap and crackle. A flicker of light. Not lightning—not down here. Instead, it was the wavering purple glow of a fluorescent bulb trying to come on but not quite making it. It was coming through a doorway just ahead to his right, lighting the rectangle of the entrance. Tom knew what room it was. The Sentinel’s office. The light flickered again. He moved toward it.

The whispers around him seemed to dim. The movements grew more distant. He reached the open doorway where the light was flickering and stepped through. He reached for the wall. Found the light switch. Pushed it. To his enormous relief, the fluorescents in the ceiling flickered on and stayed on.

The Sentinel’s office was empty.

Tom let out a sigh. It was comforting to be back in the familiar place, the cramped little cubicle of a room with the desks jammed into it and papers littering the desktops and the walls. He had spent a lot of happy hours here, sitting with Lisa, working with Lisa, talking over stories with her and just, really, gossiping about stuff. They were some of the best times he’d ever had.

He wove quickly between the desks. Went to the front of his own desk. He leaned the Warrior bat against it. Started pawing through the papers scattered around the base of his computer, searching for a page with the address on it. There were Post-its, notebooks, notices, printouts of articles he’d been writing. Paper clips. Pens. A dead-tree phone book. A syllabus, ditto. But no address. Where was it? Tom began to feel hollow inside. Was it possible he had figured this all wrong? Was it possible he had left his house and braved the fog and the malevolents for nothing? He pawed through the papers more quickly, more frantically. No address.

He stopped. He straightened. He tried to think. The haunted school was silent all around him.

Then, suddenly, that silence was shattered. The phone rang—not the cell in his pocket, but the phone on the desk. The noise was so loud and unexpected he nearly jumped out of his own skin.

He picked up the handset. Spoke uncertainly, “Hello?”

A voice came over the line—also uncertain: “Is this… is this the Sentinel?”

It was her! It was the woman in the white blouse. The same voice that had tried to speak to him before through the alien static. There was no static now. The voice was clear as a bell.

“Uh… yeah. Yeah, this is the Sentinel,” said Tom.

“I want to speak with Tom Harding.”

“This is Tom,” he said.

“I need to talk to you. It’s very important,” said the woman. Her voice was low, as if she was afraid of being overheard.

“All right,” said Tom, “I’m listening. Go ahead.”

As he spoke the words, Tom had a powerful sense of déjà vu, a powerful sense that he had had this conversation before, lived through this moment before. He felt as if everything that was going to be said now had already been said. More than that. He had the strangest feeling that the script of the conversation had already been written, and that he could not speak any other words but the words that he would speak.

She’s about to tell me that she can’t talk over the phone, he thought. That it’s too dangerous.

“Not now,” said the woman. “I can’t talk over the phone. It’s too dangerous. You have to come to my place. Tomorrow. In person. Alone. I have information you’re going to want to hear.”

“What kind of information?” said Tom—the words just came out of him. He knew he couldn’t say anything else. The script was already written.

“Never mind that now. Just come to my apartment tomorrow at four. My name is Karen Lee. I live at 47 Pinewood Lane. The Pinewood Apartments, apartment 6B. Come alone, and don’t tell anyone. Don’t let anyone see you.”

Without thinking, Tom picked up a pen and scribbled the address down on a Post-it note: Karen Lee. 47 Pinewood Lane, Apt. 6B.

“Miss Lee, can you just give me some sort of idea what we’ll be talking—” he heard himself begin to say.

But then—as he knew it would—a dial tone interrupted him. The woman had hung up.

Slowly, Tom lowered the handset back into its cradle. How weird was that? Knowing what she was going to say before she said it. Being unable to answer her in any way but the way he had.

Because it was a memory, Tom realized. That’s why. Because the conversation already happened in the past and I was just remembering.

He stared at the Post-it note, at the name and address scribbled there. Then he raised his eyes to the door, and to the darkened hallway beyond.

They’re all memories! he realized. Those ghosts out in the hall. Those whispering voices. They’re all memories.

That’s why the school was haunted. It was his memory. It was haunted by things that had happened but that he had forgotten since being shot, since lapsing into a coma. He had come here to find a source of information and he had. The source of information was his own mind.

Well then, he had reached his destination, hadn’t he? That was the good news. He had found his way into his memory. Now all he had to do was find the trail of memories that would lead him to the truth—the truth about who had shot him, and the reason he couldn’t wake up.

Just as he thought that, the lights in the ceiling started to flicker. The Sentinel’s office went in and out of shadow.

Tom quickly stuffed the Post-it note into his pocket. He picked up the Warrior bat.

The light snapped off. The room was plunged into darkness.

“Tommy.”

A whisper from the doorway. He looked. Very faintly, he could make out Lisa’s figure.

She beckoned to him.

She whispered: “This way.”

21.

By the time he reached the office doorway, Lisa had melted away again into the shadows. He was hardly even surprised this time. But he wondered: why had she been there at all? He had gotten the address he’d come for. Wasn’t that what she was trying to lead him to? What else was there?

Tom stepped hesitantly into the hall. Immediately his eye was drawn by a light to his right—a thin line of light running across the floor at the corridor’s end. He knew it was coming from underneath the gym’s big double doors. Someone was in the gym.

And Lisa—her silhouette—was standing in the nearby shadows.

“This way, Tommy.”

There was more she wanted him to see. More he had to remember.

Tom began moving toward the line of light. As he did, he became aware that a new tension had come into his body, a new acid sourness was roiling his stomach. He did not want to do this. He did not want to go to the gym. There was something in there. A memory. A memory he did not want to recover.

That was the trouble with searching for the truth. It wasn’t always pleasant. It wasn’t always something you wanted to find.

Tom moved reluctantly toward the light beneath the gym doors. He watched Lisa’s silhouette meld with the shadows and vanish as he approached. All around him, he heard faint whispers, felt movements as if people were passing by him. Phantoms of things that had happened, things half recalled. He ignored them. They were just distractions now. He kept moving toward the gym.

As he neared the door, he heard muffled voices on the other side. A guy and a girl, talking. He couldn’t make out the words. He heard a clank and a bang. He recognized that sound. Someone was lifting weights. Dropping the weights on the mat.

I came here after school to get my keys, he thought.

He was remembering now. The three guys from the football team had surrounded him in the locker room. Gordon had come to his rescue. In the excitement, Tom had forgotten his keychain, left it in his locker when he went back to his final class. He hadn’t noticed the keys were gone until later, after school, after he’d gotten ready to leave the Sentinel and head home. Then he went to the gym to recover his keys. He had thought the school was empty by now. But it wasn’t.

He reached the gym door. The voices continued within. He put his hand out in the darkness until his fingers brushed the metal bar that released the latch. He pushed the bar gently, opened the door just a crack, just enough for him to see through.

He knew what he would see a moment before he saw it. All the same, the sight—the memory—struck him like a punch.

In the bright light beyond the door, he saw Marie and Gordon. They were at the far end of the gym. Gordon was standing near the wall racks where the free weights hung. He was dressed in shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. He was curling a bar with heavy weights on it. Tom could only guess how much: A hundred pounds? More? Gordon’s massive biceps bulged and strained as he brought the bar up from his thighs to his chest.

Marie was sitting in the small bleachers there, sitting on the second tier, watching Gordon lift. Her blond hair was tied back, and she was beautiful in a white blouse and jeans, beautiful as always. She sat leaning back, with her elbows propped on the tier behind her. She never took her eyes off the weight-lifting quarterback.

And even from across the room, the look in Marie’s eyes was unmistakable. It was a look of powerful admiration, powerful attraction. And something else, something more. It was a look of… What was the right word? Ownership. Yes. She was looking at Gordon as if he belonged to her, and as if she belonged to him, too.

Tom had come into the gym when he thought it would be empty, and he was seeing now what he had seen then.

Finishing his set of curls, Gordon gave a grunt and dropped the bar to the floor. The weights bounced against the mat, rattling loudly. Marie and Gordon did not notice him there in the doorway.

Marie shook her head in open admiration. “You are a mighty man, Gordon Thomas,” she said. She fluttered her eyelashes comically. “You make my girlish heart go pitterpat.”

Gordon couldn’t help but smile a little at the flattery, but it was a grim smile and he turned away from her.

Marie rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, sweetheart, don’t be like that, all right?”

“I just don’t like it,” he said.

Marie leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “Oh, baby, I know, but it’s just for a little while.”

Gordon put his hands on his hips. He looked down at his sneakers, shaking his head. “Three of the guys almost shredded him today,” he said. “He doesn’t deserve that. And he doesn’t deserve what you’re doing to him either.”

“Right!” Marie lifted her eyes heavenward again. “You’re such an innocent, Gordon, you know that? You think Tom’s your friend. You think he wrote that story because he’s some kind of heroic reporter dedicated to telling the truth no matter what. Well, he’s not your friend, sweetheart. He’s never been your friend. He’s been jealous of you since we were in elementary school. And he’s had a creepy crush on me since forever, too. That’s why he wrote that stupid story. To get back at you. And to get to me. Well, now he has me. Or he thinks he does, anyway.”

Still standing with his hands on his hips, Gordon looked at her. “It’s mean,” he said. “It’s mean and it’s dishonest and… I don’t like it.”

“Oh, baby,” said Marie with feeling. “I know. I know, I know, I know. It’s because you’re so good, you’re so sweet. But I have to do it. Trust me, okay? If I can just make him feel he has a chance with me, I know I can keep him from… you know. From writing anything else. I know he’ll stop. For me. And he’s got to stop. He’s got to. Otherwise, he could ruin everything. Oh, come on, baby,” she said as Gordon turned his back on her. She climbed down off the rafters now. She went to him. She stood behind him. Put a hand gently on his back, between his shoulder blades. “Come on,” she said, her voice soft and coaxing. “It’s just for a little while. I promise.”

Gordon could not resist her—any more than Tom had been able to resist her. Gordon turned. He wrapped his arms around her. She clung to him, pressing her face against his chest. They held each other fast.

Tom stepped back and let the door close. The light beneath it went out. The memory was over.

He stood in the darkness without moving. He stared at the door in front of his nose. He stared at nothing. All of Marie’s sweet smiles. All her admiring words. That kiss outside her house. All lies. All make-believe.

He’s had a creepy crush on me since forever.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted to remember this. No wonder he’d blanked it out. He could not believe how much it hurt. Next to Burt’s death, it hurt more than anything he had ever felt in his life. He understood now why people said they were brokenhearted. It felt that way. He felt as if Marie had tossed his heart to the ground and broken it into a million pieces.

“But why?” he whispered into the dark. Why had she done it? Even in his sorrow, the curiosity that always pulsed at the core of him would not leave him alone.

I know I can keep him from writing anything else. I know he’ll stop. For me.

What had she wanted to keep him from writing? The story about the team was already published. Why had she pretended to like him? Why had she hurt him so badly?

“Why?” he whispered again.

In answer, there came a low, casual laugh from behind him.

Tom spun around, clutching the Warrior bat in his two hands.

There in the darkness stood the Lying Man.

22.

The anger went off in Tom like an explosion, a red rage that blasted out of his core and spread all through him. He had just seen Marie—remembered Marie—revealing her disdain for him, dashing his heart to the ground. And now here was the laughing, conniving, insinuating, threatening, and terrifying Lying Man. And Tom had had enough.

He cocked the bat over his shoulder. He wanted to pound the Lying Man’s laughter back into his throat.

But where was he? A moment ago his shadowy presence had been standing right in front of him. That lean, dark face with its smart, bright eyes—that face that somehow sent a chill up his spine—had been smiling at him from no more than a few feet away. And now…

Now the laughter came again from a distance. And Tom saw the Lying Man—the shadow of the Lying Man—halfway down the hall.

Furious, he cocked the bat even farther over his shoulder and stepped forward.

“What do you want?” he shouted. “Come on, you coward! What do you want? Stop trying to mess with my mind! Stop playing head games with me! Just come on and say it! What do you want?”

Tom advanced another step, but the Lying Man didn’t back away. He didn’t seem afraid at all. He stood in a relaxed posture, his eyes glinting in the darkness. Just as before, something about him, something about his half-seen features, sent an icy shiver up Tom’s spine. Angry as he was, he felt it. For all the Lying Man’s easy laughter, for all the soothing calm of his voice, there was just something terrifying about this guy.

The Lying Man’s laughter trailed off into a low chuckle. “I told you, Tom,” he said in a tone full of friendship and sympathy. “I only want for you what you want for yourself. I mean, you wanted the truth, right? Well, now you have it. Now you see. The truth is that Marie doesn’t really like you very much at all. All that love you felt for her? All that tenderness and yearning all these years. Marie just thought it was—what was her word?—creepy. When she pretended to like and admire you, she was playing with you, my friend. She was playing with you so she could control you, like a puppet on a string—convince you to do whatever she wanted.”

Tom came another step closer, brandishing the bat, breathing hard. But he could feel the anger—and the strength—draining out of him. The Lying Man wasn’t lying now, was he? He wasn’t lying about Marie. That was the truth about her, all right. And just hearing it spoken out loud filled Tom with sorrow—a heartbroken grief that sapped his energy.

The Lying Man seemed to sense this. Rather than retreating from him in fear, he took a casual step toward him. Tom could now see his smile, his teeth gleaming gray in the shadows. For some reason he couldn’t name, the sight made his gorge rise into his throat, made him feel he might be sick.

“I know it’s painful for you, Tom,” said the Lying Man sympathetically. “But better to find out now, right? Better to find out before you make a fool of yourself. Or, that is, before you make a bigger fool of yourself than you already have. You see? I’ve helped you, Tom. I’ve helped you find the truth you were looking for. And here you threaten me with that bat of yours. Where’s the sense in that? Why should you be angry at me?”

Tom had no answer. The tide of his sorrow rose within him and the tide of his strength and anger continued to recede. He stopped advancing on the Lying Man. The bat drooped and settled onto his shoulder.

The Lying Man seized the moment and took another easy step toward him. The lean face and its arch features became clearer in the dark—and though Tom felt even more nauseated, somehow he couldn’t look away.

“You know what this reminds me of?” the Lying Man said. “Do you remember, Tom, when you wrote that story about the football team? Do you remember how everyone got angry at you? And why? All you’d done was tell the truth. You told the truth and they didn’t want to hear it, so instead of facing it squarely, they got angry at you. They got angry at the messenger because they didn’t want to hear the message. Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing to me now? I’ve shown you a truth you didn’t want to know, and now instead of confronting it bravely like a man, you’re yelling at me and threatening me! It’s a kind of cowardice really, isn’t it?” He laughed again, clearly unafraid.

Tom let the bat drop off his shoulders. He let the head of it sink to the floor. What was he going to do? Brain the guy with it? For what? Talking? Telling the truth about Marie? No. The Lying Man was right. That was just cowardice. There was no point taking his anger out on him. That wouldn’t change a thing.

He let a long stream of breath come sighing out of him. He just felt tired now. Exhausted, in fact. Totally played out.

Marie, he thought miserably.

“Oh, don’t be too hard on her, Tom,” said the Lying Man. It was as if he could hear Tom thinking! “After all, you’re not so pure of heart either, are you?”

Tom stood powerless as he watched the Lying Man come another step closer, as the Lying Man moved smoothly into a patch of deeper shadow that nearly obscured him from Tom’s view.

“That’s part of the truth, too, isn’t it?” he said in his serene and reasonable voice. “What Marie said about you. About your motives for writing that story. She has a point, doesn’t she? You were upset you couldn’t be on the team. And you were jealous of Gordon, weren’t you?”

Tom lowered his chin, looked at the floor. “Sometimes,” he muttered. He wished it wasn’t so, but it was.

“And you did want to steal Marie away from him.”

Tom shook his head weakly. That wasn’t why he wrote the story. It was never his reason.

“Are you sure?” said the Lying Man, as if Tom had spoken these words aloud. “Are you absolutely sure those weren’t your motives? Are you sure you’re not just as much a liar as Marie is? I mean, look at yourself, Tom. Really look at yourself for a change. Look at your life. You’ve lost your brother. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve spent years pining for a girl who despises you. And as for who you are… well, you like to think of yourself as a courageous seeker after truth, I know. But I sort of suspect you’re just an envious little person trying to use your newspaper to take vengeance on people who are more successful than you are.”

Tom stood slumped, unable to find the energy even to answer. Was it true? Was that really his life? Was that really himself? Right then, right after seeing Marie, right after hearing what she said about him and feeling his heart break inside him, he certainly felt… well, he felt as miserable as the Lying Man’s description of him. He felt worthless. Weak. As if life weren’t even worth living.

So maybe the Lying Man wasn’t such a liar after all.

Tom slowly lifted his head. He looked down the hall, peered into the shadows in the direction of the Lying Man’s voice. But he couldn’t see him anymore. The Lying Man seemed to have vanished into the darkness.

And then, suddenly—suddenly the man was standing right beside him. He was murmuring quietly into Tom’s ear.

“You see, Tom, it’s as I said. I just want for you what you want for yourself. And you know what that is, don’t you?”

“No,” said Tom weakly.

“Yes, you do,” said the Lying Man. “You know what you really want.” He chuckled softly. “Death, Tom. That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want to come out of this coma at all, do you? Why should you? Your life isn’t worth living. Of course you want to die. You want to die.”

Horrified, Tom turned to him quickly. The Lying Man smiled, his expression seemingly full of kindness. But his eyes! His eyes were dancing with the raging electric power of his absolute wickedness.

“And now,” said the Lying Man, “we’re both going to get what we want!”

The next moment he was gone—all of him was gone, that is, except his laughter. His laughter continued to trail back to Tom out of the shadows, fading only slowly.

And as the laughter faded, a new noise replaced it. Soft at first. A steady, rhythmic pounding. It was coming from upstairs.

Tom listened. The thudding went on. It grew louder. Now and then it was punctuated by high, hollow shrieks that drifted like ghostly echoes down the stairs, down the hall, to where Tom stood.

The malevolents!

Tom’s eyes widened as he lifted his gaze to the ceiling.

Moment by moment, the pounding upstairs became more insistent. The shrieks became wilder, more ravenous.

Of course. He had forgotten. The Lying Man was the master of the malevolents. The Lying Man was the King of Death. He had kept Tom here, delayed him, stalled him with his talk while the fog climbed up the hill outside, while the malevolents advanced on the school.

And Tom, heartbroken and confused, weak with sorrow, had listened to him. Had stood here. Had given the malevolents the time they needed to make their approach.

And now they were here. Pounding on the windows. Shrieking for entry.

Hungry for Tom’s life.

23.

The pounding grew steadily louder. Those strange echoing shrieks grew louder. And now there were other noises. A crack. A spatter.

Glass breaking. The windows were giving way.

Fear flowed into Tom like electricity, jolting him out of his weakness, jolting him out of his sorrowing daze.

He heard the Lying Man whisper in his mind:

I want for you what you want for yourself. Death. You want to die.

Was it true? He was so confused now, so unhappy, so incredibly weary of fighting his way through this nightmare, that he didn’t know what was true anymore or whom to trust. But he wanted to know. He still had that—that curiosity to know the truth that drove him on, that wouldn’t let him give up.

You want to die, the Lying Man insisted.

And Tom thought: No. No, I don’t. Not yet, at least.

He was still a reporter, after all. He couldn’t die before he learned the rest of the story.

He hesitated another moment. He heard the malevolents trying to break in upstairs. He thought of their poisonous claws, their ravenous teeth. He remembered the lanky man with blond hair who had been dragged away screaming into the fog. He had cut his wrists, Lisa said. He had given in to despair. He really had wanted to die.

That’s not me, Tom thought, fighting down the voice of the Lying Man. That’s not going to be me.

He gripped his bat tightly and started to run.

He dashed through the darkness of the halls. Whispers trailed past him like wind. Shadows dashed by on every side of him. Memories. The haunting memories he had wanted to leave behind. Pulling at him. Calling to him.

He reached the bottom of the stairway. Looked up into the dim, gray light above. Not much light—just the light leaking down the hall from the lobby windows—but enough to make his way by. The pounding up there continued. The shrieking continued. They would break through soon. He had to hurry.

He started up, taking the stairs two and three at a time.

It was not fast enough.

As he reached the top of the flight, he heard a tremendous shattering noise. He peered down the hall, through the shadows, into the brighter light of the lobby. He saw that two of the windows had already broken, their shards and splinters glittering on the floor in the gray light. Now, even as he watched, thunder crashed and lightning flickered and another window exploded and then another. The wind brought the rain lashing in through the openings. More lightning. More thunder. And then the fog tumbled into the corridor.

And the malevolents came with it.

Lit by the flickering blasts of light, the monsters climbed through the broken windows, fighting with one another to be the first in. They tore at one another’s rotting piebald flesh with their toxic claws. The jagged broken glass tore at them, too. They screamed—and their horrible screams were lost beneath the wild, raging thunder. But nothing slowed them down. Nothing stopped them. As the mist hissed into the school, as the wind-whipped rain drenched the glass-strewn floor, as the thunder and lightning rocked the school and lit the corridor, the malevolents tumbled through the windows, staggering across the hall, sniffing the air and eyeing the darkness, searching for their prey.

There was no chance of getting past them. No chance of fighting so many. Tom had to find another way out.

He turned and looked away from the lobby, down the other hall. At the rear of the school, there were doors leading onto the athletic fields. Maybe there was still a chance he could reach them before the fog surrounded the school entirely. He could cross the fields and climb the fence and make his way to town, to Pinewood Lane, to Karen Lee.

Panting, terrified, he left the lobby of monsters behind and took off down the hall to the back of the school at top speed. Yet, even now, even in his fear, he was aware of the heaviness and confusion inside him.

Look at yourself, Tom. Really look at yourself for a change. Look at your life. You’ve lost your brother. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve spent years pining for a girl who despises you…

He knew that heaviness was slowing him down, making him weak. He knew he had to fight against it.

Despair is not an option.

He gritted his teeth. Pushed himself on, racing headlong down the hall.

There they were: the double doors that led to the fields in back. There were no windows here, so he couldn’t check the conditions outside. He didn’t know what he was about to find. He didn’t know what he was charging into. But he had to try it.

He flung himself against the doors. Hit the bar of the doors with his shoulder and shoved it open, tumbling after it out of the school, into the back fields.

He tumbled into a tempest. The storm out here was raging full blast, the power of it almost unbelievable. The sky was flashing continuously. The thunder cracked and muttered and rolled. The wind lashed at his face and the rain pounded him.

But there was no fog. There were no malevolents. Through the streaming gray downpour, he could see across the playing fields to the horizon.

He headed in that direction—he tried to, anyway. He got three steps, and then the wind strengthened even more, hammering against him without ceasing. He fought forward another step, but the wind was overpowering. The rain whipped his face painfully. He had to raise his arm to protect his eyes.

As he stood there, trying to battle the wind, there was a flash of lightning and a blast of thunder so loud it deafened him. He felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, shake so hard he was afraid it would open up and swallow him. He had never felt a storm like this—it seemed beyond the bounds of nature.

For a moment, the noise trembled lower, but it seemed to Tom it wasn’t fading but only gathering for some greater blast.

And then it came. A crackling flash of lightning like no lightning there had ever been, a supernatural explosion of radiance that blinded him and a crash of thunder that swallowed every other sound. The wind grew even stronger. The rain fell even harder. It seemed he was being spun and lifted and carried away by a whipping whirlpool of light and sound and air and pain. It was as if the chaos in his heart had overflowed into the chaos around him and the chaos around him had engulfed all the world.

Everything turned gray as the tempest overwhelmed him. There was nothing left anywhere except the storm.