Nightmare City Part 13

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.

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, das.h.i.+ng his heart to the ground. And now here was the laughing, conniving, insinuating, threatening, and terrifying Lying Man. And Tom had had enough.

He c.o.c.ked 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 c.o.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 friends.h.i.+p 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, brandis.h.i.+ng 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.

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

Gla.s.s 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 las.h.i.+ng 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s-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 flas.h.i.+ng 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.

PART III.

MURDER AT THE MONASTERY.