A New York Nightmare!

by Barry Hutchison

  “Excuse us,” said Denzel. “Sorry. Coming through.”

  Denzel was navigating a path between a group of nuns and a gaggle of well-dressed businessmen all yakking into phones when he heard a voice whisper in his ear.

  Go left.

  “What?” Denzel said, turning to Smithy.

  Smithy blinked. “What?”

  “Did you just tell me to go left?”

  “When?”

  “A second ago.”

  Smithy thought back. “I don’t think so. Why’d you ask?”

  Denzel listened for a moment, then shrugged and continued towards the door. Three paces on, the voice came again.

  Go left.

  There was a door over in that direction. It wasn’t an exit like the big sweeping glass doors up ahead, but a small, unassuming wooden door, with a small, unassuming metal sign on the front marked Staff Only.

  Denzel waited for a break in the foot traffic, then cut across the flow. “Come on, I think we should go this way,” he said, beckoning with his head for Smithy to follow.

  The going was easier once they left the crowd behind. Denzel glanced back nervously, worried one of the scary American security guards was going to come racing after them, gun drawn. No one seemed to be paying them any attention though, and they made it all the way to the door without being apprehended or shot.

  Through there, the voice whispered. It echoed slightly, as if Denzel’s ear was at one end of a long pipe and the speaker was standing at the opposite end.

  Glancing around again, Denzel tried the handle. It rattled but the door didn’t budge. There was a keypad fixed to the wall beside the door, four little lines indicating where a PIN should go.

  Denzel looked the door up and down. “It’s locked,” he announced.

  Smithy let out a loud “Ha!” that came dangerously close to catching the attention of everyone else in the airport terminal. With a shh from Denzel, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “No door can keep us out, thanks to my incredible, amazing and…”

  Smithy’s voice tailed off. He watched as four digits flashed up on the keypad. With a clunk, the door unlatched and swung open a few centimetres. A warm wind wafted out through the gap.

  “Did you do that?” Smithy asked.

  Denzel shook his head. “Wasn’t me.”

  Inside, whispered the voice. Hurry.

  “It says we should go in,” said Denzel.

  “What does?”

  “The voice in my head.”

  Smithy stared at Denzel blankly for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Fair enough. If you can’t trust a voice inside your own head, then who can you trust?” he said.

  He nudged the door open.

  They stepped into the shadowy room.

  Then the floor gave way beneath them and they fell, screaming, into the dark.

  The darkness flickered, then Denzel blinked in a sudden bright whiteness that made his eyeballs ache. He was still falling, but now wind whistled around him, and the expanse of whiteness was drawing closer and closer. He could see his shadow on it now, with Smithy’s beside it.

  Several seconds of screaming later, Denzel hit the floor in a cramped, dimly-lit room. Clouds, he realised.

  The white things were clouds.

  He twisted his head around and looked up. Yep, there was the sky. Those were definitely clouds down below.

  “Aaaaaaaaaargh!” Denzel screamed, but the wind whipped the sound out of his mouth and launched it upwards in the direction of outer space.

  The clouds, which had looked like a layer of marshmallow, became wispy and then they plunged through them and Denzel got his first glimpse of New York City. It was only a glimpse because he immediately squeezed his eyes closed, but they were open long enough for him to see hundreds of thousands of buildings spread out below him, with a large rectangle of green positioned near the centre.

  “Cor, this is a turn-up for the books, isn’t it?” said Smithy, shouting to make himself heard. “I didn’t see this coming.”

  Whoops, sorry, said the voice in Denzel’s head. One minute.

  “Everyone looks like ants,” Smithy commented, but Denzel refused to open his eyes to check.

  Got you, the voice said, then the wind fell away as the world flipped upside down.

  Denzel opened his eyes to find himself much closer to the ground now. He was falling past tall buildings and could see himself reflected in their many windows as he tumbled down, down, down towards the traffic-jammed street below.

  No. This time, said the voice, and everything flipped again.

  A thoom rang out as Denzel landed on something metallic.

  Three seconds later, Smithy landed on top of him. They flailed about in a tangle of arms and legs for a moment, before Denzel jumped to his feet. “We’re alive!”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Smithy.

  “I’m alive! And I’m not even hurt!” Denzel cried.

  His head slammed into the room’s low ceiling and the whole place echoed with a metallic thump.

  “Ow!” he yelped, covering his head with his hands. It was at that point that he realised they weren’t in a room at all. They were in a van.

  “Hey, you made it!”

  Denzel and Smithy both whipped round to find a girl grinning at them from the van’s front seat, which was turned one hundred and eighty degrees away from the steering wheel and black-tinted windscreen.

  Or, at least, she was grinning vaguely in their direction. She had what looked like a virtual reality headset fixed to the top half of her face, and her smile was actually pointed a metre or so to Denzel’s left.

  “Sorry about the mid-air thing. Forgot to recalibrate. Still, you’re here now.”

  “What? What’s going on?” Denzel demanded. “How did we get here? We were in the airport, then we were in the sky, then—”

  “You teleported,” said the girl. “I teleported you.”

  “Into mid-air?!”

  “Yeah, that was my bad. Sorry.”

  Denzel shook his head, her words just filtering through the shroud of panic that clouded his brain. “What do you mean, ‘teleported’?”

  “I mean you teleported. Well … kinda. Teleported, fell through a gap in the fabric of reality. It depends on your point of view, really. The important thing is, you’re here now, and none of your atoms are mixed up.”

  She adjusted a dial on the side of her headset. “They aren’t, are they?”

  “No!” said Denzel. He looked himself up and down. “I mean, I don’t think so. Who are you?”

  “More important than that,” said Smithy. “Is this a van?” He leaned the top half of his body out through the side, looked around for a moment, then pulled it back in. “It is,” he confirmed. “It’s a van. It’s definitely a van. I knew it.”

  “What are you doing? Someone could have seen you,” said Denzel.

  “Nah. We’re in a … what do you call it?”

  “Van?” Denzel guessed.

  “No, the other one,” said Smithy. “Alleyway. There’s no one around.”

  The girl nodded. The extra weight of the VR kit seemed to make it quite tricky, and her head sort of flopped up and down a bit in quite an awkward way. “Yeah, I made sure we were tucked out of sight, just in case anything went wrong with the transport.”

  “You mean in case our atoms merged,” said Denzel.

  “Yeah. That. Or, you know. Anything … explosive,” said the girl. She pushed the headset backwards off her head, revealing a short crop of ginger hair, a mass of freckles and the greenest eyes Denzel had ever seen. “I’m Weinberg,” she said. “Ada Weinberg.”

  She held out a hand for Denzel to shake, realised it was covered in oil, and gave it a quick wipe on the blue and silver camo of her Vulteron uniform before extending it again.

  “Welcome to New York!”

  One short ride and a quite staggering amount of horn-honking later, Denzel and Smithy stepped out of the back of the van on to a narrow road between t
wo rows of tall buildings. As Denzel’s feet hit the pavement, a delicious sugary smell simultaneously hit his nostrils, instantly making his mouth water.

  “Doughnuts,” he said, sniffing the air. The last thing he’d eaten had been a bag of peanuts on the plane, and those had tasted stale. His stomach gurgled loudly enough to temporarily drown out the sound of traffic thundering past at both ends of the narrow street.

  “We’ll leave the van here,” said Weinberg, hopping down beside them. She pressed a button on her key ring and a series of locks slid into place inside the vehicle. “You can’t be too careful,” she explained. Then, to Denzel’s disappointment, she marched straight past the doughnut shop, heading for the much busier street that ran at right angles to the one they were on.

  Yellow cabs, white vans and a lot of people criss-crossed past the mouth of the side road, honking and revving and shouting. It was like everyone and everything was angry, and no one really knew why.

  “Should you go out there dressed like that?” asked Denzel, gesturing to Weinberg’s uniform.

  “It’s New York City,” Weinberg said. “I could go out there in a monkey-suit and a tutu, and no one would bat an eyelid.”

  She stepped out of the side street and into the throng of pedestrians. Sure enough, none of them gave her so much as a second look. “Now, come on,” she said. “It’s just round here.”

  Smithy and Denzel followed her on to the street and were immediately struck by the scale of it all. Buildings stretched to the sky on all sides, making the street feel like the floor of an enormous canyon.

  Even without moving his head, Denzel reckoned he could see more people than he’d seen in his whole life up to that point. There were thousands of them – tens of thousands, maybe – all rushing around like they should have been somewhere important five minutes ago and were going to be in big trouble once they got there.

  “Hey, I know this place,” said Smithy, as Weinberg stopped outside a building with three sets of doors. The number 350 was fixed above the middle door, while the revolving doors on the left and right were marked “Observatory Exit” and “Observatory Entrance” respectively. “This was in that film.”

  “What film?” asked Denzel.

  “The one with that woman in it,” said Smithy. “And the planes are shooting at her at the end.”

  “The one with the woman in it?” Denzel muttered. “That narrows it down.”

  Denzel leaned back and looked up at the building.

  And up.

  And up.

  There, emblazoned in gold twenty or more metres above the doors, were two block-printed words.

  “Empire State”.

  “Did it also have a massive gorilla in it?” Denzel asked.

  Smithy rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. Don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure? It wasn’t King Kong?”

  “That’s it!” said Smithy. “I saw it when it first came out. Don’t remember a big gorilla though.”

  “The big gorilla was the whole point!” Denzel said. “They take the gorilla from the island, it gets loose in New York, grabs a woman and climbs up the Empire State Building with her. Then they shoot him.”

  “Spoilers!” Smithy protested.

  “You’ve already seen it,” Denzel reminded him.

  “Oh. Yeah,” said Smithy. “Man, I loved that film.”

  Weinberg grinned and pushed open the middle door. “You think the movie was good? You should have been there for the real thing.”

  Denzel and Smithy both stared after her, then followed her inside. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Denzel. “Are you telling me King Kong was real?”

  They had entered a grand hallway, which appeared to be made entirely from marble. A carving of the Empire State Building was fixed to the wall at the far end. An old man in a red jacket sat behind a desk in front of it, nodding and smiling as a tourist in a hat shaped like a big apple fired questions at him.

  “Well, not exactly, but most of it, yeah. Not that I was there, of course. Before my time.” She headed for one of the two sets of lift doors near the desk. Ropes had been placed for people to queue up, but there was barely anyone around at the moment. Weinberg gave the old man at the desk a wave as she passed. “Harvey.”

  “Ada,” he said, smiling one of the widest, most beaming smiles Denzel had ever seen. “You folks have a good day now.”

  The lift doors opened. Weinberg led Denzel and Smithy inside, then pressed a complex sequence of buttons on the elevator controls. The doors began to close, but were stopped when the tourist in the big apple hat jammed an arm between them, forcing them to spring open again.

  “Hey there!” he said. “Going up?”

  “No, sorry,” said Weinberg. “We’re going down.”

  “Down?” said the man. “There’s a down?” But before he could get an answer, the doors closed with a ping and the elevator rumbled down into the bowels of New York City.

  Denzel wasn’t an expert in geography. In fact, he wouldn’t even consider himself an amateur at it. The truth was, he barely really thought about the subject at all.

  He knew north was sort of up the way, and that countries closer to the equator were hotter than those further away (although he could never remember the word “equator” and instead just called it “the middle bit”).

  He knew that water went down plugholes the opposite way in the southern hemisphere, but only because he’d seen it on an episode of The Simpsons. He knew there was a Great Wall in China, some Pyramids in Egypt, and three chip shops in his home town, all within walking distance.

  The three chip shops were within walking distance of each other, that is – not within walking distance of the Great Wall of China or the Egyptian Pyramids. At least, Denzel didn’t think they were, but then, as has already been established, geography wasn’t really his strong point.

  What he did know was that New York was one of the biggest cities on the planet, and hundreds of years old. Ghost activity in a place so old and huge would have to be through the roof, Denzel reckoned. Considering how big a branch of the Spectre Collectors was based in his little home town, he couldn’t wait to see how epic the New York branch was.

  The lift rumbled to a stop.

  “You ready for this?” asked Weinberg.

  Denzel and Smithy both nodded. “Ready.”

  The door opened. Denzel stepped out first, then stared in disbelief at the vast army spread out before him.

  The ranks were made of oddly misshapen creatures, all wielding axes and spears, and kitted out in rusty old suits of armour. A legion of decaying zombies and bleached skeletons were shambling into attack in a pincer movement, which threatened to tear the army in two.

  “Finally!” said a stocky, lank-haired boy through a mouthful of doughnut. “It’s your turn, Weinberg. My undead army is going to rip your lot to pieces.”

  Weinberg stepped out of the elevator, glanced briefly at the battlefield spread out on the tabletop, then took a small stack of cards from her front pocket and flicked through them.

  While he waited, Denzel looked around the room they had emerged into. It was a basement. Just an ordinary old basement, with bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, stacks of cardboard boxes piled in the corner, and ancient-looking pipework running horizontally across one wall.

  On the wall opposite was a haphazardly arranged book case, a map of the city (dated 1972) and a metal filing cabinet that had been bound around each drawer with lengths of willow. Based on what little he knew about … well, anything, really, Denzel guessed that was where they stored the gems that held all the trapped ghosts.

  “I’ll play Gartron’s Rewind,” Weinberg announced, tossing one of the cards on to the table. “So you have to move all your platoons back to the start of your previous turn.”

  The boy swallowed his doughnut, then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his Oberon robe. “But that’s going to take me ages!” he protested. “I’ve got over a hundred figures the
re.” He raised his eyes to Denzel. “All hand-painted.”

  “Um, well done,” said Denzel, which seemed to be the answer the boy was looking for. He reached across the battlefield and shook Denzel’s hand.

  “Martinez. Joseph Martinez. I’m Weinberg’s partner.”

  “Uh, yeah. Hi. Denzel.”

  Martinez smiled, then scraped the last of the doughnut mush from his teeth with his tongue. “Yeah. Yeah, I know who you are! We’ve heard all about you. You’re a celebrity. I can’t believe you’ve graced us with your presence.”

  Smithy held a hand out for Martinez to shake, but the Oberon boy let out a little cheep and drew back. “Don’t hurt me,” he yelped, then he quickly tried to compose himself. “I mean, uh, hello. You’re the … the…”

  “Ghost,” said Denzel.

  “But just call me Smithy.”

  Swallowing nervously, Martinez reached across the table and gave Smithy’s offered hand a brief, half-hearted shake.

  “You feel normal,” he muttered, then he shook his head. “I mean … I mean, I wasn’t sure what… Forget it.”

  Martinez looked down and quickly began moving all his zombies and skeletons back across the table. Denzel scanned the room around them again.

  “So,” he asked. “Where’s everyone else?”

  Martinez and Weinberg exchanged a glance. “Uh, everyone else?” said Martinez.

  “Yeah, you know.” Denzel gestured around the cramped basement. “Everyone else. The other Spectre Collectors.”

  “It’s just us,” said Weinberg.

  This time it was Denzel and Smithy’s turn to swap confused looks. “You what?” said Denzel. “I don’t understand. This is New York, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” confirmed Weinberg.

  “It is,” agreed Smithy.

  “And New York’s huge.”

  “One of the biggest cities on Earth,” said Weinberg.

  “Massive,” added Smithy.

  “And people must die here, like all the time.”

  “Constantly.”

  Smithy sniffed, as if fighting back tears. “It’s tragic, really.”