Nightmare City

30.

The garden was dark now. The people were gone. The white temples, the green lawns, the vivid flower gardens—all the colors seemed somehow to have drained out of them. They were all draped in shadow. They looked like the abandoned scenery of a stage set, covered in canvas after the show has ended.

Tom stood at the edge of the place he had thought was heaven. He lingered there as the twilight fell. As the scene grew darker around him, he saw that a new scene began to come into view beyond the garden’s far border. A light began breaking through the distant gloaming, a white radiance rising like the dawn. It seemed as if the garden had somehow blocked this light from his vision before and that now, as the temples and the paths and flowers faded, the hidden brilliance was revealed.

The light grew brighter as the garden shaded over into nothingness—brighter and brighter until Tom could barely look at it directly. Holding up his hand to shield his eyes, he squinted into the whiteness. There’s something in there, he thought. There were shapes dimly visible, rising and falling in a jagged skyline. A whole city, it seemed, was hidden in this radiance, vast and majestic towers and palaces rising obscurely in the depths of the light.

As Tom stood staring, trying to make out the details of the scene, a figure—a man—emerged from the glare and came toward him. He stepped to the edge of the visible and stopped. He was just a small shape against the bright skyline. But Tom knew him. Tom would have known him anywhere.

His heart in his throat, his eyes filling, Tom stood and gazed at the man across the vast space between them, the uncrossable space. He ached to go to him and see his face and hear his voice. But this was not that time.

The figure seemed to gaze back at him as the rising light began to engulf him. Then, very slowly, he lifted his right arm and set his hand against his forehead in a crisp military salute.

A single tear overflowed Tom’s eye and ran down his cheek. The distant light grew brighter and brighter. It was soon so bright that the saluting figure was obscured by its glare. And yet the light grew brighter still until finally it overcame the man completely. He seemed to vanish into it.

And there was nothing but the light.

With that, Tom opened his eyes and saw his mother. She was sleeping in a chair beside his hospital bed. She was leaning far forward, resting her head on her arms, resting her arms on the edge of his mattress.

Tom lifted his hand and touched her hair gently.

The gesture woke her at once. She raised her face, confused at first. She looked around for a moment and then seemed to remember where she was. Then she saw him.

“Tom?” she said, her voice breaking. “Tom!”

His mouth moved as he tried to whisper an answer.

Frantic, his mother reached for the plastic tube that hung beside his bed—the tube that held the Call button that would summon a nurse. The tube slipped through her trembling fingers twice before she could get ahold of it. Then she got it, pressed the button quickly—and let it drop.

She seized hold of Tom’s hand with both her hands. She brought his hand to her face and started kissing it again and again. She was weeping.

Tom’s eyes fluttered shut again. He did not have the strength to keep them open. His mother pressed his hand against her cheek and he felt her tears on the back of it. He heard her sobbing his name again and again.

His eyes closed, he smiled. He didn’t remember everything that happened, but he had a sure and certain understanding that he had found his way. Through the fog, through his memory, through his sorrow, out of his coma, back to his life.

And he was going to live.

31.

The next time Tom woke, it was night and he was alone. At first, a thrill of fear went through him. He wasn’t sure why. What are you afraid of? he asked himself. In answer, images flashed through his mind: empty rooms, fog-shrouded streets, hunkering, malevolent zombies with their outstretched claws…

Like something out of a horror movie. He couldn’t make sense of it. I must’ve had a bad dream, he thought.

He looked around him. He was in a hospital room just as he had been before. His mother was gone now and the lights were out. The room was dark. As his eyes adjusted, Tom could see there was a TV hanging on the wall in front of him. There was a window on the wall to his left. Under the window was a small, low table with a vase of carnations on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie.

He stopped smiling.

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

The rest came back to him in one sudden rush.

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

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

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

The gunshot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he slid off the edge of the bed and tumbled to the floor.

It was a long drop, and he hit hard. He took the jolt on his shoulder, but he felt it in his chest, a jarring, rattling pain. He coughed, trying to catch his breath. The room filled with a high-pitched alarm as the heart monitor wire was torn off his finger and the monitor flatlined, its red numbers dropping to zero as if Tom had died.

Tom had not died. Not yet. But now Dr. Cameron cursed and came at him once again.

Tom caught a glimpse of the man striding around the bed, charging through the shadows. The heart monitor continued its high-pitched scream, and Tom wished he had the breath to echo it.

Dr. Cameron swiftly turned the corner of the bed. Tom rolled over again. He hit the table under the window. Ignoring the pain in his chest, he reached up and grabbed the table’s edge. He pulled himself up on it and reached for the flower vase with his free hand.

Dr. Cameron grabbed him, his fingers digging into his shoulder. Tom was shocked at the power of the man’s grip. Dr. Cameron started to force him down to the floor.

Tom wrapped his hand around the flower vase and brought it crashing into the side of Dr. Cameron’s head.

Dr. Cameron shouted as the vase shattered, as the broken edge of it sliced into his cheek. Blinded and in pain, he reared back, rose up, clutching at his own eyes.

At the same moment, the door of the room opened. A nurse came rushing in, flipping on the light.

She had heard the alarm—the heart monitor. She had seen the readout at the nursing station down the hall. She had seen the numbers drop. She’d come rushing in to make sure Tom was all right. As the room was flooded with light, she saw Dr. Cameron staggering backward, clutching at his bleeding face.

“Doctor?” she said. “Are you all right?”

Over the endless scream of the monitor’s alarm, Tom heard Dr. Cameron shout, “Get out of my way!” Propped against the table, he saw the bleeding doctor stumble toward the nurse and shove her aside as he headed for the door.

Coughing, Tom slid down to the floor. He stared up at the ceiling. He heard Dr. Cameron’s footsteps running away down the hall. And yet he thought he could still hear him nearby, speaking into his ear.

No, it wasn’t Dr. Cameron. It was the Lying Man.

You just don’t know when to quit, Tom, he said.

Tom closed his eyes and smiled weakly. “I’ll never quit,” he whispered.