by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“You can look for His encoded signal in their dream data, right? Then rewrite the UnderTone generator so when you see Him appear, you stop it from playing His music. Anytime you see something from the brain that might be encouraging His sounds—inviting Him in—you make the UnderTone play the unpleasant music. You code the system to do the opposite of what it’s doing now. Tell their brains not to let Him in. Maybe a new version could even train them to automatically suppress the patterns that He attaches himself to.”
Tynes looks at me for a long time. I can see him rolling the idea around in his mind. Training the UnderTone, our faithful sheepdog, to bark and warn the brain away from this dangerous ravine we’ve discovered.
Finally he replies, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I can’t tell if he’s being ironic. But the next thing he says is “Go home to Maya. I’ll get to work on it.”
Fatigue from the acute stress of the day washes over me. But I’m still jittery, on edge, feeling cracks forming in the ground beneath me. I need to see my daughter.
So I go home.
—
There’s a note from my nanny, Rosalind, that says she found Maya reading under her blanket with a flashlight well past bedtime. When I sneak into her room, I get a little tingle of joy to find her slumbering peacefully. She doesn’t move a muscle when I kiss her forehead.
That night I wasn’t so lucky.
The darkness enveloping me is total. But in a dreadful way beyond my comprehension, wisps of the dark cohere, and though there’s no light, I can SEE Him. Churning in the blackness. His horns shifting and deforming. His flickering grin. And those teeth. It feels like He’s nothing but teeth.
I can’t move at all, but I’m not physically restrained. Just paralyzed. And yet I’m being held in place. I need to move, to fight. An animal panic wells within me. But I remain trapped, pinioned. I can feel Him somehow pressing. Not down upon me, but INTO me. Inside me. The weak membrane between Him and me stretching. So close to bursting.
Then it breaks, and I finally really feel Him. A front of searing pain followed by an even more horrifying numb. A stench unlike any I’ve ever known. This is what it’s like to rot.
I beg. I plead with Him to kill me. Every horror I’ve ever imagined is nothing compared to this. The sickening hurt, the filth. How can anything so terrible exist?
That’s when He starts whispering, and somehow this is worse. It’s no language ever known to man, but what’s left of my debased body responds like a tuning fork. He’s showing me how it’ll be now that I’m His.
But suddenly a reddish glow flashes into the blackness. Something touches me, and I know it’s not Him. I can still feel Him pressing and pressing, but that sensation slowly localizes in my head. Like He’s receding there. Or getting pushed.
It touches me again, this time on my chest, like a doctor vainly inspecting my corpse for signs of life. I grab at it…
And she yanks me awake.
But no, that’s not right. I’ve just slipped into another nightmare, because there’s my daughter standing in front of me, a scream frozen in her throat.
She’s covered in blood.
—
Grilled cheese at 4:30 a.m. Maya contentedly munching away. My heart rate starting to return to normal. Shedding the scary palpitations and double beats, but the core of the horror remains.
You’re infected just like the others.
How? Was just seeing Tynes’s image of Mr. Smoke enough? Listening to his UnderTone? And if I have it, what about Maya?
I try to keep my voice steady. “So it wasn’t a bad dream?”
“No, I told you. I just woke up, and there was something wet on my face. And when I saw it was blood I got scared, but it was just my nose—like happened last winter—but it didn’t stop. I came down to get you, but you wouldn’t wake up and…you were making noises…”
She has a bloody nose tonight. And this is what? Just a coincidence?
“Mommy had a nightmare. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I know.”
Maya drops a crust on her plate and starts on the other half. After a sip of milk, she says, faux casually, “You asked, ‘What did He do to you?’ Who were you talking about?”
I unclench my teeth. “No one, darling. Sometimes when you wake someone from the middle of a dream, they can be…confused. Not quite all there yet.”
She searches me with those blue eyes for a long time. Her sandwich forgotten. It makes me think, She knows something.
But she says only, “I’m not really sleepy anymore. Can we read a story?”
It’s only two hours until she’d be up anyway, and I sure as hell won’t go back to bed.
—
My phone is full of alerts telling me none of the Somnonauts slept last night either.
Once Maya disappears through the stark white doors of her school, a fog of unease descends upon me. I’ve never been so tired, but it’s more than that. Some kind of psychic residue from my nightmare clings to me. I feel…soiled.
To say nothing of my dread at what I’ll find when I return to my lab.
Walking under the lovely row of huge plane trees out front, the place seems peaceful enough. Then the door opens, seemingly of its own accord. I stop dead until I make out Tynes standing there in the gloom. I guess he’s been watching for my arrival.
As I step into the stairwell, he says, “After you left, I rewrote DreamCatcher’s UnderTone code. Still early, but I think it’s going to work.”
Pure relief floods into me when I hear those words, but it quickly recedes, leaving more questions. The worst of which is: Wait…how do you know?
But I don’t need to ask him. The answer’s obvious.
He tried it on himself last night.
I look at Tynes with new eyes, the root of all this coming into focus.
His aged features, his tired face, and all the strange bulges and lumps in his baggy clothes. I grab his arm and clock the way he winces. I pull up the sleeve of his sweater to find an odd brass bracelet around his wrist with the head of a thick screw sticking out. The sharp end pressing into his flesh. There’s another one on his forearm, and I imagine a line of these devices going all the way up his arm.
Mr. Smoke came from him.
As he rolls back his cuff, he says, “They’re a kind of cilice I adapted from a Dominican design.”
“How long has He…been inside you?”
A shadow passes over his face. “Hard to say. The dreams began when my MindDraw engine really started working, but He got strong only after I dozed off during a session…Of course that’s why I came to you. I wanted…”
“A record of your nightmares. So you could see Him while you’re awake. Study Him. Try to understand what was happening to you. Maybe start on a treatment.”
“I…I never imagined He could infect other people.”
“But He has. All of us now.” His eyes ask the question: Even you? I nod. “And I never even went under in DreamCatcher. How is that possible?”
Bill thinks about it. Haltingly, he says, “When you run MindDraw on the machine here…it uses the same recognition engine as DreamCatcher. So the data’s been tuned by…the bad dreams.”
“You mean contaminated. By Him.” I think for a minute. “But look how fast my group is falling apart, and you’ve been able to live with Him for a while…”
“Yeah. I think he comes in a lot stronger when you’re asleep and your brain is almost defenseless. When I tried DreamCatcher, He got a lot worse. But by then, I was already pretty good at holding Him at bay. Your people had no tolerance, and they got a real concentrated…exposure.”
He notices my fists clenching, and his voice rises with urgency. “I tried the new code I wrote last night, and He didn’t come for me. I actually slept, and it’s hard to explain, but I don’t feel Him pressing anymore.”
I wish I didn’t know exactly what he means.
He continues, “As if the new software made me…smoke-free. Maybe i
t’s like you said: suppressing Him even once has an immunizing effect on your brain. Like a vaccine.”
I try to sift my welter of emotions. This man knew he was sick, and in his desperation, he brought his illness to Dreamland. Without telling me about it. It makes me want to bash his head into the wall. But after last night’s dream, I’m a little desperate now too. Enough to demand a session with his new software right away. I’m so tired I feel like I could actually pass out in the machine. But how could I ever trust him to—
The piercing sound rips that thought apart: a woman’s scream.
Coming from the floor above. My floor.
I race up the stairs ahead of Tynes. Running down the hall, I hear them before I get around the corner. Cassie’s pleading, a sharp edge of hysteria in her voice. “No. Stop it. It’s what He wants!”
Marco’s baritone: “Shut up. It keeps Him away.”
“No! You don’t understand. It keeps Him satisfied. Please! You have to starve Him, or else—”
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
I round the corner to see Cassie grasping Marco’s right arm, using all her weight to pull his hand toward her. In that hand he’s holding a bread knife, which he’s been using to saw his left index finger into fine slices like he’s cutting pepperoni for a charcuterie plate. The table is a lake of blood.
Marco lashes out. His first stroke opens her scalp from ear to eyebrow. Cassie screams and falls to the floor. Marco plunges the knife into her back. Yanks it loose with a squelchy kissing sound.
I yell, “Marco!”
He turns and stares at me, his kindly features twisted into a mask of rage. He steps toward me, lifting the knife.
All I can think is: Who is this person?
I point at the half mirror of the room’s large window and shout, “Marco Ilgunas! Look at yourself!”
I have no idea what he sees in his reflection, but Marco screeches and wrenches away from the window, stumbling over Cassie and slamming the back of his head so hard into the opposite wall that it punches through the plaster.
The blow seems to wake him up. He drops the knife as poor Cassie scuttles away from him in terror. His face collapses into a sob. Tynes arrives behind me.
“I…I didn’t mean it. I just…She was—” His eyes catch the window again, and he lunges for the door, knocking me out of the way and spilling Tynes to the floor.
I check Cassie’s wound as she cries uncontrollably. It’s high on her shoulder, so no organs, and it’s not bleeding hard enough to be arterial.
Tynes gets up and stares at the blood and slivers of finger on the table. I snap at him. “Take her down the street to emergency.” I run into the hall to deal with Marco.
From Dr. Hendricks’s supply cabinet, I fill a syringe with a big dose of propofol, the stuff that killed Michael Jackson. Once Marco’s down, we’ll have to get him over to the psych ward. A voice inside me resists the plan, proposing that this disaster can still be contained. But it’s too late for that. Things are spiraling out of control. Cassie could have been killed.
Rounding the corner to the dormitory section, I see Teresa, another of my Somnos, coming down the hall in her nightie, pacing through a layer of thick white smoke gathering on the floor. She smiles like she’s won the lottery and doesn’t seem to even see me, clearly in a sleep-deprived trance. A problem for later.
Where’s all this smoke coming from?
At first I think Marco set a fire, but then I see the mist’s source: our deep freeze in which we store dry ice for packing blood samples is open and boiling a cloud of CO2 onto the floor. I shut it and approach Marco’s room.
He’s sitting on his bed weeping. Holding his bleeding left hand.
I stop at the door, but he can feel my presence. He says, “I didn’t want to hurt anyone else. But He made me…Doctor, what’s happening to me?”
I creep forward to avoid spooking him. “Marco, this isn’t your fault. We know something’s wrong, and we’re going to fix it. We just need to work together.”
“You have no idea what to do, do you?”
“We’re going to find a way—”
“I do. I know exactly what has to happen. He thinks He’s in control, but He’s not. He’ll go away if we just stop dreaming.”
As I close on him, I carefully reach into my pocket and take the syringe in my right hand, hiding it against my leg. Marco’s not looking at me. He’s examining his hands joined in a bloody knot in front of him.
He continues, “But it’s hard, right? How do you keep someone from dreaming?” He cocks his head as if still pondering the question. “I asked myself over and over. But I’m so tired, you know? All this pressure building up in here.” He pokes a bloody finger into his forehead.
I’m near enough now, thinking, Jab it through his shirt into the meat of his shoulder. Then get the hell out of here.
But I freeze, realizing that won’t work. Propofol needs a vein. I might as well stab him with a toothpick for all the good it’ll do.
He turns and levels a sick grin at me. “Then I figured it out.”
Marco slams a fat cylindrical thing into his mouth. He looks like he’s doing something silly to amuse a toddler. The object has a white cap and translucent curves, but it takes me a second to realize what it is: one of the little airplane bottles of water we leave in the break room. But there’s something strange about this one. Inside it’s full of white, eddying…smoke.
What the fuck?
My mind goes so quickly to this strange demon haunting us that a crucial instant passes before the obvious explanation seeps in: it’s CO2. Marco stuck a chunk of dry ice from the deep freeze into the water bottle.
Why would he do that? Is he trying to symbolically consume—
Then I get it.
He made a bomb.
Just as I reach for the bottle, Marco’s head explodes.
—
I lose a little time. Here I am, ears ringing, my left hand numb, wiping blood out of my eyes. Gobbets of flesh dangle from my hair. My fingers pass over something hard embedded in my forehead. A piece of plastic? I pull it out and look: a tooth.
You and Tynes have killed someone…He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead…And soon you will be too.
In the mirror, my blood-drenched face seems to flicker.
I stumble back over to his bed, just to make sure. The blast tore his face into several loose flaps of skin, the two on either side spreading to make a wide bloody chasm. Part of his scalp peeled up in jagged shreds. In that mess of gore and shattered bone I can’t help but see it: a rough outline of Him.
You’re going crazy.
Then: What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I pull out my phone to call 911, but stop. The screen shows four missed calls from Rosalind. A series of texts, the last one reading:
Emergency. Pls call now. Maya n trouble.
It’s too much. I can’t handle any more. I just stare at my phone like a drooling zombie.
This is your daughter. Get it together.
Marco is past all help. He can wait. I call Rosalind.
“Dr. Dennings, thank god!”
“What happened?”
“Maya…on the field trip today? She…she stabbed her teacher.”
“What? That’s not possible.”
But of course it is…And that means now He’s inside my Maya too.
“I…It’s true. She did. With scissors. I was taking a video for you…”
“Send it to me.”
Rosalind pauses. “I don’t think you want—”
“I need to see what happened!”
“Okay, I’ll send it.”
“Where’s Maya now?”
“With me. I’m driving her to the hospital. She started shaking…and saying things…I can’t understand her. They called nine-one-one for Mrs. Laird. Said the police were coming. But I couldn’t just wait there. She was having a seizure. I didn’t know what else to do! So I—”
“You did th
e right thing. Bring her to me. I’ll take her over.”
I hang up. Thirty seconds later, a new text comes from Rosalind. I open the attached video link, and no nightmare has ever been worse.
At the Balcones Children’s Craft Center, Maya stands at a kid’s easel totally absorbed in her painting. But she’s not having fun. Her face is pale and blank. Her eyes glazed over. I can’t see the surface, but it looks like she’s finger painting. Something she hasn’t done since she was four. There’s a drop of dark paint trailing down her arm, and I realize she’s not using paint. Mrs. Laird comes over to admire the work with a big patronizing smile that I watch sour into dismay, then disgust. She takes Maya by the shoulders, saying something like, “Honey, are you okay?” Maya tries to turn back to her painting, but Mrs. Laird holds her in place. Maya shakes. The camera starts coming forward, Rosalind realizing something’s wrong. I watch Maya’s little hand snake into the pocket of her apron, and then, nearly too fast to make out, she strikes Mrs. Laird in the neck. The woman topples back onto her ass, and I can just discern the orange handles of a pair of craft scissors sprouting from the side of her windpipe. The camera falls to the ground.
It can’t be real. My child. My baby girl.
A braying sob of grief and terror erupts from my throat. But Maya needs me. I can’t give in to despair.
Take a deep breath. Get through this.
I know you will.
It feels like someone else whispers those words to me. Almost as if Marco’s mangled corpse spoke them. Him, I guess.
I stumble out of the room. I want to scream for help, but something tells me that will only bring further disaster. The police would shut down the entire floor.
Can’t allow that, can we?
I close Marco’s door and lock it with my master key.
Then I run for the stairs.
Tynes is just coming through the door as I arrive. He looks like hell. A traumatized vacancy in his eyes, as if he’s going into shock. There’s a big patch of hair missing on the side of his scalp that bleeds down his hairline behind his ear. His lower lip is bloody too. Cassie must have attacked him. But whatever happened, I need him now.