Nightmare City

  ACCLAIM FOR ANDREW KLAVAN

  “This book will appeal to anyone who is looking for a fast-paced adventure story in which teens must do some fast thinking to survive.”

  —SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW OF IF WE SURVIVE

  “Klavan turns up the heat for YA fiction . . .”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW OF IF WE SURVIVE

  “A thriller that reads like a teenage version of 24 . . . an adrenaline-pumping adventure.”

  —THEDAILYBEAST.COM REVIEW OF THE LAST THING I REMEMBER

  “Action sequences that never let up . . . wrung for every possible drop of nervous sweat.”

  —BOOKLIST REVIEW OF THE LONG WAY HOME

  “. . . the adrenaline-charged action will keep you totally immersed. The original plot is full of twists and turns and unexpected treasures.”

  —ROMANTIC TIMES REVIEW OF CRAZY DANGEROUS

  “[Klavan] is a solid storyteller with a keen eye for detail and vivid descriptive power . . . The Long Way Home is something like ‘The Hardy Boys’ crossed with the ‘My Teacher Is an Alien’ series.”

  —WASHINGTON TIMES

  “I’m buying everything Klavan is selling, from the excellent first-person narrative, to the gut-punching action; to the perfect doses of humor and wit . . . it’s all working for me.”

  —JAKE CHISM, FICTIONADDICT.COM

  “Through it all, Charlie teaches lessons in Christian decency and patriotism, not by talking about those things, or even thinking about them much, but through practicing them . . . Well done, Andrew Klavan.”

  —THE AMERICAN CULTURE

  “This is Young Adult fiction . . . but the unadulterated intelligence of a superb suspense novelist is very much in evidence throughout.”

  —BOOKS & CULTURE

  ALSO BY ANDREW KLAVAN

  If We Survive

  Crazy Dangerous

  The Homelanders Series

  The Last Thing I Remember

  The Long Way Home

  The Truth of the Matter

  The Final Hour

  © 2013 by Andrew Klavan

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Klavan, Andrew.

  Nightmare City / Andrew Klavan.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59554-797-2 (Trade Paper)

  I. Klavan, Andrew. II. Title.

  PS3561.L334N54 2013

  813'.54—dc23 2013023670

  Printed in the United States of America

  13 14 15 16 17 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for the Ditmore Family—Michael, Rebecca, Nick, Catie, Morgan, and Jessie

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE HORROR IN THE FOG

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART II: THE HAUNTED SCHOOL

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  PART III: MURDER AT THE MONASTERY

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  PART IV: THE RETURN OF THE LYING MAN

  30

  31

  32

  EPILOGUE: WHEN IT WAS OVER

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART I

  THE HORROR IN THE FOG

  1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And suddenly, heaven was gone.

  2.

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

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

  Tom answered. “Yeah.”

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

  “Hello?” he said more loudly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  So yeah—a puzzle: Where was she?

  “Mom?” he called.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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