A New York Nightmare!

by Barry Hutchison

  “So, six-hour flight, huh?” said Weinberg. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much,” agreed Denzel.

  “Still, was it worth it?” Weinberg asked. “Are you glad you came?”

  “Uh … yeah,” said Denzel, as diplomatically as he could. “It was certainly interesting.”

  “Please don’t make us come back,” said Smithy.

  Martinez laughed. “What? But we never got that game of Battlefist.”

  “And it was you who asked to come visit in the first place!” said Weinberg.

  “Ha. Yeah,” said Denzel, then he frowned. “Wait, what? No, it wasn’t. You asked us to come.”

  Weinberg glanced over to Martinez, then they both shook their head. “Nope,” she said. “We got a message you wanted to come check the place out.”

  “We got a message you wanted to meet us,” Denzel said.

  Weinberg and Martinez both frowned. “Well, that’s weird,” Martinez said. “So that means … what? Someone else wanted you to come here?”

  “Why would someone want me to come here?” Denzel wondered.

  “You opened the gate,” Weinberg said. “When you touched it. It was you that made it open.”

  Denzel looked a little embarrassed. “OK, OK. But it wasn’t on purpose! And we caught everything.”

  “We think,” said Smithy.

  Everyone turned to look at him. “What do you mean?” Denzel asked.

  Smithy shrugged. “Well, we thought it was just the shark that came out to start with, but then there was a massive Viking ship and a big octopus. You probably noticed them.”

  “And we caught them, like I said.”

  “But how do we know something else didn’t escape and make its getaway?” Smithy said. “You know, while we were distracted fighting sharks and Vikings and everything.”

  “So what are you saying?” Denzel asked. “That someone deliberately arranged for me to come over here, and that they somehow knew I’d touch the gate and free whoever was trapped behind it?”

  “Or whatever,” said Smithy. “If there was enough room back there for a shark, a Viking ship, a huge octopus and, like, a zillion ghosts, I reckon pretty much anything could have been in there.”

  He grinned, then shook his head. “Although, when I say it out loud, it does sound pretty unlikely. Forget I said anything.”

  Martinez and Weinberg exchanged a glance. “Uh, yeah,” Martinez said. “We’ll look into it.”

  Weinberg pointed at Denzel. “You need to look into why you’re a magnet for all this stuff,” she said. “I know someone in the UK who might be able to help. I’ll get the details sent to you.”

  “Thanks,” said Denzel. He shifted uncomfortably on the spot. “You don’t really think something else got out, do you?”

  “Nah!” said Weinberg. “I mean … probably not. I mean—”

  Before they could discuss it any further, a pleasant female voice rang out. “Last call for passengers Denzel Edgar and … er … Smithy Smith. Your flight has finished boarding. Please proceed through security immediately.”

  “You better go,” said Weinberg. Denzel opened his mouth to speak but she quickly jumped in. “We’ll look into it. Now, go! You don’t want to miss that six-hour flight.”

  “We do,” said Denzel, as he and Smithy hurried towards the security check.

  “Bye!” called Smithy. “Thanks for letting us play with your big monkey!”

  He stopped when a large security man blocked his path. The guard glared at Smithy and Denzel in turn.

  “Uh, ‘big monkey’ is a nickname,” Denzel explained.

  “For what?” the guard demanded as he checked their tickets and passports.

  “For their… Um…”

  “Magic horse,” said Smithy. He blinked in surprise. Even he hadn’t been expecting to come out with that.

  “You played with their magic horse?” asked the man.

  Denzel nodded slowly, not quite sure what else to do. “Yep,” he said.

  The guard eyeballed them both for several seconds, his hand resting on his holstered gun. Then, with a wave of his hand, he directed them towards the security gates. “Well, don’t some people have all the luck,” he said. There was a smile in his voice, even if his face wasn’t showing it. “Have a good trip.”

  “Thanks,” said Denzel, taking back his ticket and passport. “You too. Um, I mean… Have a good day.”

  The guard nodded, and this time he did smile. Denzel and Smithy scurried through the gate and, to their relief, neither of them bleeped.

  “Oh, son,” called the security man. Denzel turned and looked back at him. He was framed in the gate, all traces of the smile gone from his expression. His eyes were glassy, like a doll’s, and his voice came out as a low, rumbling hiss.

  “He is coming.”

  And then he stepped aside, and dozens of passengers flooded through the gate, bustling Denzel and Smithy towards their flight and whatever – or whoever – awaited them back home.

  Denzel Edgar was halfway through some particularly unpleasant maths homework when he saw the ghost.

  He’d barely taken out his workbook when he first felt the icy tingle down his spine. He was sharpening his pencil when all the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Denzel looked around to find where the draught was coming from, but every window and door was shut tight.

  He was wrestling with a head-wrecking bit of algebra when his eraser jumped out of his pencil case and flopped on to the dining room table. Denzel stopped writing and looked at the rectangular rubber with its graphite-stained ends. He looked at his pencil case. Then, with a shrug, he placed the eraser back inside.

  A moment later, it hopped out again. This time, Denzel didn’t move to return the rubber to the case. Instead, he just stared at it, wondering quietly what was going on. As he stared, his breath formed wispy white clouds in front of his face. It reminded him of being outside in December, only he was inside. And it was June.

  Denzel’s whole body began to shiver. He felt cold from the inside out, but he felt something even more troubling, too.

  He felt like he was not alone.

  “Wh-who’s there?” he whispered. The words sounded smothered by the suffocating silence of the house. He heard nothing, saw nothing, but felt … something. A tickle of movement across his face and through his hair, as if the air itself were taking form around him, becoming something different, something more.

  Down on the tabletop, Denzel’s eraser stood on end. It walked towards him, rocking from side to side the way his dads would walk the wardrobe from one end of his bedroom to the other whenever they took it upon themselves to reorganise the place. Unlike the wardrobe, though, the rubber was walking all on its own.

  Instinctively, Denzel slapped his hand down on the waddling eraser. He felt it squirm in his grip as he forced it back into the pencil case and zipped it inside. The pencil case twitched and wriggled, so Denzel slammed his schoolbag down on top, and quickly backed away from the table.

  He could feel his heart beating at the back of his throat. His dads wouldn’t be home for another hour or more. He was all alone in the house.

  So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that he wasn’t?

  And then he saw it, reflected in the glass of a picture frame: a dark shape lingering in the corner of the dining room, spreading up the walls and across the ceiling like a nasty case of rot.

  At first, Denzel tried to convince himself he’d imagined it. The dark thing behind him wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. He was going mad, obviously. That last equation had fractured his poor overworked brain, making him see … whatever that thing was.

  He knew if he could just summon the courage to turn round he’d find nothing there but the empty wall. Maybe there’d be a shadow or something, but nothing like the writhing tangle of smoky black tendrils that was currently reflected back at him.

  Slowly – ever so slowly – Denzel turned. As he did, he closed both his eyes,
so by the time he was facing the corner, he was still none the wiser as to whether anything was actually there.

  He wanted his eyes to open, but his eyes were having none of it. It took several deep breaths and a whispered pep talk before his right eye relented. His left one, however, remained fully committed to staying shut.

  To Denzel’s dismay, when he opened his eye he saw that the corner wasn’t empty. The thing that lurked there looked like a cross between an octopus and a chimney fire. It was as black and intangible as smoke, with six or seven long tentacles all tangled in knots. The shape seemed to pulse in time with Denzel’s crashing heartbeat, getting faster and faster as Denzel’s panic bubbled up inside him.

  One of the thing’s tentacles reached out for him, and Denzel stumbled back. He raced for the door leading into the hall and pulled it open. The tentacle whipped past him, slamming the door again and holding it shut.

  Denzel ducked and scanned the room, searching for something to defend himself with. The best he could find was a little plastic model of the Blackpool Tower that a neighbour had brought them back from holiday. It wasn’t the ideal weapon with which to battle a malevolent supernatural entity, Denzel suspected, but it was the only one he had.

  “S-stay back!” he said, thrusting the Blackpool Tower towards the smoke thing, pointy-end first. “I’m w-warning you.”

  One of the smoky tendrils lashed out. A snow globe – another holiday memento – exploded against the wall above Denzel, showering him in glass, glitter and a tiny reproduction of Edinburgh Castle.

  Yelping in fright, Denzel covered his head, just as a dining chair flipped into the air and slammed down beside him with a smash. Denzel dived for the door again, but the tendril still had it held closed.

  The window! It was Denzel’s only chance of escape. Waving the Blackpool Tower in what he hoped was a vaguely threatening way, he leapt over the broken dining chair and raced towards the window. He was making a grab for the cord that would pull up the blinds when the whole thing exploded inwards, knocking him off his feet and on to the dining table.

  Denzel’s momentum carried him over the polished tabletop. As he slid off the other side, the table tipped, shielding him from the smoke thing – and whatever had blown his window to bits.

  Cautiously, Denzel poked the top of his head above the table edge, just enough to give him a view of the room. Two figures stepped through the gap where the window and part of the wall used to be. It was hard to make them out through the cloud of plaster dust, but from their silhouettes it looked like the bigger of the two was carrying an assault rifle.

  Denzel looked at the small plastic Blackpool Tower he’d somehow managed to keep hold of during his short flight across the room. After a moment’s consideration, he quietly set it down on the floor.

  “Scanning for hostile,” barked the figure with the gun. It was a man, that was all Denzel could figure out. Young-ish, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. He jabbed his little finger in his ear, trying to clear out the ringing noise from the explosion. Someone must have heard the sound. Help would be on its way. With a bit of luck, no one would kill him before it arrived.

  “Any sign?” asked the other figure. This one was a teenage girl, Denzel reckoned, and sounded far less confident than her partner.

  “Can’t pinpoint it,” the man said, and something about his voice this time told Denzel he was a teenager, too. A red light blinked on the barrel of his gun, as he slowly circled on the spot. “But it’s here.”

  Denzel glanced over to the corner. The black shape was still there, pulsing and twisting as before. He found himself gesturing towards it with his eyes, trying to draw the strangers’ attention to it without being noticed himself.

  “Perhaps the Third Eye of Sherm will shed some light on the situation!” the girl said grandly. Denzel heard the boy sigh as his partner began to mumble below her breath. The room was still one big cloud of white dust, but through the fog Denzel saw a shape illuminate in purple light on the girl’s forehead. It was an oval with a circle in the middle, like a child’s drawing of an eye.

  “The Third Eye of Sherm!” boomed the girl, in a voice that rolled around the room. When the echo faded, the boy gave a disapproving tut.

  “Do you have to do that every time?”

  “Yes,” said the girl. “It’s tradition.”

  “It’s dumb,” the boy replied. “Besides, it blows our element of surprise.”

  The girl jabbed a thumb back towards the hole where the window had been. “Um… Hello? I’m not the one who obliterated the wall. The front door was literally five paces along the street.”

  “You have your traditions, I have mine,” said the boy. “Whatever. Can you see it?”

  “The Third Eye of Sherm sees all,” said the girl.

  “Yes, but does it see the hostile?”

  The girl turned and scanned the room. The purple glow of the eye on her forehead swept across the walls like a searchlight, passing right across the smoke-thing. “No,” she admitted. “It doesn’t see that. It can’t be here.”

  The boy gave his gun a smack with the heel of his hand. The light flickered then came back on. “You sure? I’m definitely reading something.”

  “What do you trust more? Eight billion pounds of advanced tracking technology,” began the girl. She tapped her forehead. “Or this baby?”

  “Eight billion pounds of advanced tracking technology,” said the boy, without hesitation.

  Denzel wanted to scream to them that both the tracking technology and the fancy glowing eye were both rubbish, because the “hostile”, as they called it, was right there in the corner of the room, just sort of hanging about looking ominous…

  Copyright

  First published 2018 by Nosy Crow Ltd

  The Crow’s Nest, 14 Baden Place, Crosby Row

  London SE1 1YW, UK

  www.nosycrow.com

  ISBN: 978 1 78800 040 6

  Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Nosy Crow Ltd

  Text © Barry Hutchison, 2018

  Cover and inside illustrations Rob Biddulph, 2018

  The right of Barry Hutchison and Rob Biddulph to be identified as the author and illustrator respectively has been asserted.

  All rights reserved

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of Nosy Crow Ltd.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  Typeset by Tiger Media

  Papers used by Nosy Crow are made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

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