In the City of the Nightmare King

by V. S. Santoni

  “What is it?”

  “A shortwave AM radio. I used it when I was a kid to look for number stations.”

  “Number stations?”

  “They’re like top-secret spy broadcasts. Well, they might be. They might be aliens, for all we know.” He checked the radio for batteries and out clunked two Duracells. They’d probably been gathering dust in there since the ’90s. “Let me go find some batteries.” Dad headed upstairs to check his electronics box. The family photo drew me back in. We looked really happy in it. I wanted to feel that way again: part of a family—a whole family, not something people dismissed as “broken.”

  Dad walked back in with new batteries, slid them into the radio, then flipped it on. Fuzzy static poured out of the speakers. “All right!” Dad said. Now that the old thing lived again, he set about fiddling with the tuner. A boy’s garbled voice mumbled something through the speaker.

  “Wait—” Dad put his ear to it “—I think we have something.”

  He fingered the dial until the voice came through clearly: “You are trapped in a dream! You are trapped in a dream!”

  Dad raised an eyebrow, unable to comprehend the boy’s words, but the message turned my blood to ice. The frequency dropped, and I quickly snatched the radio and started turning the knob, searching for the signal, but the speaker only pumped out static.

  “Juanito, you okay?” Dad asked.

  Dad had always said I was pale for a kid born to a pair of islanders. I’m sure I looked even ghastlier than usual right then. It took me a few beats to collect myself. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  He studied me a second longer, not sure why my skin had suddenly gone pale. Then he rested his hands on my shoulders. “Let’s take a break and get something to eat.” He walked into the kitchen to look for his phone, but I stayed in the living room, staring at the radio, thinking about the ominous message. The more I thought about it, though, the more I doubted myself. After spending the whole day psyching myself out, my mind was playing tricks on me.

  “Johnny, do you want some pizza?” Dad asked.

  Pizza, the panacea for my concerns. Worrying served no purpose. Our little family thrived again. Far from perfect, but it was mine. This demanded celebration, not suspicion. No more harrowing descents into Everywhen; no more epic clashes with the Institute.

  Chapter 2

  Dad and I settled around the dining room table. He had ordered a pizza from the local Italian place, Maria’s. It had pineapple and jalapeno on it, my favorite (I don’t trust people who don’t like pineapple on their pizza). Dad always said you didn’t know a place until you had the local pizza. If the sauce was too bitter, then the place probably wasn’t very friendly. Too many toppings? Too many problems. Too few toppings? Too little money. Maria’s pizza sauce was too sweet. But I didn’t care. The Institute was fading like a bad dream, and for the first time in months, I felt happy.

  “What’re you so happy about?” Dad teased.

  I walked around the table and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, and I stayed there for a good long minute. Dad put his hands on my forearms and squeezed, but my sudden affectionate burst confused him. “Come on, Juanito. You never act like this. What’s up?”

  “I’m just glad to see you happy, Dad.”

  “You want to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas after dinner?”

  It was our favorite movie. I settled back down. “Sure.”

  The doorbell rang. Dad and I gave each other a curious glance. We didn’t know anyone in Misthaven. Hopefully the neighbors hadn’t decided to come over and drop off a welcoming casserole. Our neighbors in Chicago never did stuff like that, thankfully. Dad headed for the door, and I followed.

  “I’m coming!” Dad shouted.

  Dad opened the door to Alison on the other side, standing there with her grandma, Hilda. Hilda wore a teal, flamingo-print muumuu, with her braided ponytail slung over her shoulder. Alison was draped in all black as usual. Something about Alison struck me. Not her looks or anything superficial like that. The feeling resonated deeper. She felt more real than everything else around her.

  “Good evening, Ernesto,” Hilda said.

  “Hilda, Alison, why don’t you two come in,” Dad said. He didn’t sound surprised to see them. My shock at seeing Alison froze me in place, so Dad nudged me out of their way. They slipped off their shoes and set them near the door, then Dad gestured to the dining room. “We’ve got some pizza if you two would like some?”

  “How kind,” Hilda said. Alison and Hilda headed in first, and I waited for everyone to sit before I joined. With no appetite in sight, I studied Alison’s hair, her eyes, the way she placed her body.

  She shifted uncomfortably and flipped her hair over her shoulders. “Nice to you see you too, J.”

  “I, uh—hey, sorry. I was . . . thinking . . . about something.” The jarring situation left me forgetting to act normal. Alison leaned forward and examined me. Something about that glint in her eye, like she trying to figure out if I were real or not. Dad and Hilda’s presence there kept me from popping off about the Institute.

  Dad reached across the table and set a plate in front of her. He did the same for Hilda, but she waved it off. “I’ll just have a cool drink,” she said. German immigrants had raised Hilda in Chicago. Her accent fell somewhere between Midwestern and European. Dad walked into the kitchen and brought back a water pitcher and poured her a glass. She took a gentle sip then set the glass on the table and placed her hands in her lap. Stiff as ever. It was like sitting with royalty. That haughtiness had rubbed off on Alison.

  Alison’s pizza lay untouched on her plate. Did she remember the Institute too? That would explain the strange behavior. Her attention shifted to my dad, then to the room.

  “You’re not hungry,” my dad said delicately to Alison.

  “Hmm?” She caught herself. “Oh no, I’m not that hungry.”

  Hilda’s patience for Alison’s manners had dried up years ago, which she conveyed with a sharp look.

  “Johnny,” Dad looked pointedly at my food. The greasy pizza stained the paper plate with a big orange spot. Maria’s pizza looked good at first, but really it was trash. “You aren’t hungry either?”

  No. My hunger had evaporated upon seeing Alison. But I nervously lifted the pizza and took a bite anyway. My actions pressured Alison to do the same. “Mmm, yum,” she said in a way both awkward and curt. Alison’s emotions always rested on the surface, making her extremely easy to read. Her discomfort mirrored my own. Was her mind like mine, a jumble of fragmented memories?

  Hilda cleared her throat and clacked her nails against the table. The quiet unsettled my dad too. They wanted Alison and me to carry on like we always did, but we were too busy psychologically profiling each other.

  “When do you start your new job?” Hilda said, her words cutting the tension.

  Dad kept his focus on me. “Tomorrow.”

  “This is quite the departure from Chicago, Johnny. Do you think you’ll like it?” the old woman asked.

  My head wasn’t in the right place to field questions. The whole predicament weirded me out. “I—yeah, sure. I’ll get used to it.”

  “That’s a good mentality for you to have.” She sounded happy with my answer. “I know things were difficult for you two in Chicago, but here you get a fresh new start. I hope you won’t try to stand out too much again.” That meant she hoped we’d go back into the closet. As she saw it, Alison and I going back into the closet guaranteed us a smooth return to “normalcy.” Typically, Alison responded to Hilda’s passive-aggressive bullshit with her own searing candor. Her choice to let Hilda’s words slide spoke volumes.

  “Johnny, you’ve been acting weird all day,” Dad said, checking my head again for a fever. “You sure you’re doing all right?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked suddenly. “Are you two just visiting, o
r what?”

  “Well,” Dad said, “the school year’s almost over, so Alison is coming to stay with us for the summer. If she wants to finish school here, I told Hilda that I’d keep her.” Dad waited for Alison and me to squeal, but when we didn’t he looked disappointed. “Isn’t that . . . exciting?”

  “Yes!” Alison said, with such thunder in her voice that it shocked me. “We are very excited!” Her jubilation rang hollow. She was acting. Back in Chicago, she’d forced me to join theater club. The teacher always criticized her for overacting. At the time the criticism pissed her off, but she never lost that tendency.

  “Yeah!” I backed her with a big, fake, toothy smile. “This is awesome. I can’t believe you guys did this.” Maybe I overdid things a little too.

  “And behind our backs too,” Alison said. “You two sure are some sneaky emm-effs.”

  “Alison!” Hilda said.

  Alison corrected herself: “Uh, sneaky rascals.”

  “Will you be staying the night?” Dad asked Hilda.

  “No. Our family is expecting me by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be driving the rest of the evening.” Hilda scooted her seat back and rose. “Thank you for inviting me in, Ernesto. Alison, walk me out, dear.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, eager to continue my analysis.

  We walked Hilda outside. Alison and Hilda didn’t speak on the way to Hilda’s old station wagon. Their already-awkward relationship had grown tense after Ali came out. Verbal sparring matches between Alison’s mom, Cecilia, and Hilda occurred with some frequency at their house. They didn’t even say goodbye before Hilda got in the car, revved the engine, and left. Alison watched the car until it vanished in the distance.

  Finally alone, I felt safe asking Alison what she remembered. If she didn’t know anything, she’d tell me. “Hey, Ali, what did you do in February?”

  My question rattled her. It could’ve meant anything, but the ghostly look on her face said a lot about what she was thinking. She concocted several answers but never spoke a single one. “I don’t . . . remember. Weirdly.”

  Her memories didn’t match up either. The three months before we found ourselves entering Misthaven remained blurry. “Alison, do you remember . . . anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember . . . the Marduk Institute?”

  Her ghostly look turned to dread. “Yes.”

  “What exactly do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of—”

  “Patchy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like you remember some things but not everything?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dad came to the front door. “Hey, you two. Are you just going to stand in the driveway all night?”

  There was no way we’d had the same dream. If she remembered the Institute, then she had to remember Blake and Hunter and Linh. But why couldn’t we remember everything?

  Chapter 3

  With a great many questions lingering, I told Dad I wanted to show Alison my new room and dragged her upstairs. She ambled about in there and absorbed her new surroundings. It didn’t look that different from my old room in Chicago. A vanity with a mirror sat near the door, and my bed lay pressed up against a wall because I slept like an overly defensive dog. Not much else in there but piled, unopened boxes.

  “Ali,” I said, “do you remember Blake, Hunter, Linh—the Defectors?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about being extracted into the white room? The vivit apparatus?”

  “I . . . It’s like I remember some stuff, and it seems totally real, but other stuff—like you moving and everything—that seems real too.”

  “Like you have two totally different sets of memories?”

  “Just like that. Hey, hold on,” she said, suspicion rising, “how do I know you’re really you?”

  “What?”

  “How do I know you’re really Johnny?”

  “How do I know you’re really Alison?”

  She looked perplexed. “You still kind of . . . feel like Johnny?”

  Magic coursed through all life, and its spark enveloped almost everything except for ordinary humans in mystical energy called an aura. Wizards sensed auras in two ways. The wizard sight allowed them to physically see, or hard-read, the aura as a golden halo shining around the subject. Hard-reading also gave the wizard the power to visualize the vivit apparatus. I knew from earlier I couldn’t use my wizard sight’s hard-reading aspect. The second method wizards used to detect auras was more subtle, passive. Wizards could emotionally feel auras. They manifested as a wave of smells and sounds and emotions. Alison’s aura sounded like an aisle of electronic Halloween decorations coming to life all at once. The noises were faint, but they were still there. This told me that our wizard senses, although substantially dulled, hadn’t vanished completely.

  Alison looked uncomfortable with the realization that our wizard senses still worked. “Something weird is going on. Creepy too. You think this is all some Institute trick?”

  “How do we find out?”

  “Have you tried any other magic-y stuff?”

  “Yeah, none of it worked.”

  “Well, if we’re here, Blake’s got to be here too.”

  “And Hunter?”

  “Yeah, J, Hunter too.”

  Dad knocked. I opened the door. He stood there, still chewing pizza, greasy sauce staining his lips. “Hey, Alison, I know it’s been a long day for you. If you’re not hungry, you can just go take a bath. I’ve got towels and everything. Johnny, I know you’re excited to see her, but why don’t you let her settle in and come finish dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. Dad was being weirdly helicopter-y. Or maybe he found our behavior a little strange. Either way, his parental oversight irritated me.

  Alison patted me on the shoulder and headed for the door. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, J. I need a shower, or I’m going to stink like that mothball-ridden car.” She stopped next to Dad. “All right, Mr. D, lead me to my boudoir.”

  How she managed such a nonchalant attitude at a time like this didn’t make sense. Regardless, she got Dad off our asses.

  Before heading to bed, I thought about Everywhen, the dreamworld all humans shared that only wizards held the power to control. Wizards’ abilities flourished in the dreamworld. If magic still coursed in my veins, it assured me easy command over my dreams. I thought to test that theory. That night I dreamt, but no magic granted me power over it. I attended the dream as an observer:

  I lay in my Veles Hall dorm, poring over Gaspar’s notes. His secrets were disguised in a handwritten clock-building manual. He spent his time at the Institute researching the Void, tossing random things into it—lamps, car parts, cutlery—then fishing them back out to study the effects. The book contained the spell he used to fetch things back out—he called it unwinding because the spell “unwound the Void’s threads from around a subject.” Reportedly, things usually returned in one piece without any strange consequences. The Void didn’t destroy anything caught in its cold vastness. It merely held them in a sort of stasis. Hunter, having become the cintamani, exhausted its power to banish the Sandman to the Void and sent him along with it, but according to Gaspar’s notes, that meant Hunter hadn’t really died—at least, I hoped not. Theoretically, the Void kept Hunter’s soul in a torpid state, but it didn’t whittle it away or kill it. Using the manual, I reached into the vivit apparatus and conjured a glowing machine that shone with a weak, pulsing red. I tampered with the engine until it whirled to life, then I waited for Hunter to materialize before me. But he never came. So, I stormed through Veles Hall looking for him. My investigation led back to my dorm, where Hunter tumbled out of my standup closet and sent us both crashing to the floor with him naked on top of me.

>   He smiled in my face and said hey and kissed me, and then shivered as a draft filled the room. He looked down then and realized he was naked as a cat, and jumped off me and covered himself with his hands. “Johnny!” he said, searching for something to cover up with. He pulled off my sheet and wrapped it around himself. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You used the cintamani to get rid of the Sandman, but it sent you both to the Void.”

  “Weirdly enough, I kind of remember that.”

  “So . . . you were trapped in the Void?”

  He flipped his straight brown hair out of his eyes. Cute boyfriend was very cute. “I guess. I—I was somewhere really dark. Then all this light shined all around me and I ended up”—Hunter scanned my room—“here.”

  Two Smiths, one with blond hair and the other black, kicked in my door. The black-haired Smith grappled me into a corner. Hunter swiftly kicked the blond in the stomach and ran for the door, but the Smith caught Hunter’s sheet and pulled him back. Then the blond Smith sprayed Hunter in the face with eirineftis.

  Eirineftis stunk like rotten raspberries. At low doses it neutralized our powers, but at higher doses it worked as a full-on knockout gas. We didn’t know where it came from or how the Institute made it, but if you heard a Smith rattling a canister inside their blazer, you had better steer clear.

  The Smith holding me back reached into his blazer, fumbled out his own can, and sprayed me too. That dreadful odor brought tears to my eyes. They burned. Then came a cough, a hack, a deep wheeze.

  And I woke up and rolled off my bed and hit the floor.

  Daylight filtered in through the window behind my desk. The dream left my heart racing. But in my chest there was also yearning—for Hunter. I missed his big cute grin and his squinty green eyes. My Institute memories didn’t seem all that believable considering I lacked the power to control dreams, but the dream itself said otherwise.