Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Miles thought about his mother, images of her murder flashing in his mind. He blinked hard, trying to force the memory away, but any time he closed his eyes the images only became more vivid and horrible.

  “A lot of people must be suffering in Hawthorne, right now,” he said. “And maybe beyond. The phones are out. On the way over here I saw a lot of people packing up and getting out of town. I hope they manage to leave, but I have a terrible feeling that whatever power is behind all of this, it won’t want to let them go.”

  Amber stared at him. “We need to go to the police. Talk to Chief Kramer.”

  “I’ve been friends with Don Kramer most of my life,” he replied. “But think about it, Amber. What do we have to tell him that he hasn’t already heard from dozens of other people ? I’m sure my mother isn’t the only person these wraiththings have killed.”

  He hesitated a moment, a fresh wave of grief sweeping over him. Amber must have seen his pain, because she reached out and squeezed his hand. Something passed between them. Miles took comfort and strength from her, but they both seemed somehow calmer. He tightened his own grip on her hand and nodded, searching her eyes. The inside of his car seemed to grow smaller. In the stillness, surrounded by the roar of the rain on the roof and hood and trunk, they breathed each other’s air. In their fear, a strange but intense intimacy was born.

  “I can’t do nothing, Professor,” she said.

  “Miles,” he said. “This isn’t a classroom, Amber. This is life and death. Call me Miles.”

  She nodded. “All right, Miles. If not the police, then what do we do? My parents are turning into monsters. And my Gran looks like she’s in some kind of weird coma.”

  “You’ve been having these visions . . . both awake and asleep . . . since yesterday morning,” he said. “It’s possible that some of these bizarre phenomena manifested prior to the first one, but none that I know of. Whatever set off this chain of events, it may have begun that same moment.”

  “But why me?” Amber asked.

  “The only way to answer that is to start deciphering your visions. But every moment that passes, these things are out there preying on people, so we need to be smart about it. From what you’ve told me, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the goddess in your visions is the source of this chaos.”

  “Navalica,” Amber said, her gaze distant as she recalled her visions.

  “We have to find out whatever we can about her.”

  “If the phones are down, I’m betting the Internet is, too,” she said. “You’re talking about what, going to the library, poring through textbooks and stuff? We don’t have time for that. It could take all day. How many people are going to be dead by then? My parents are . . . I can’t just leave them like that.”

  “What choice do we have?” Miles replied. “And what good are you going to be able to do them if you stay here? Without knowledge of how this is all happening, and what we’re up against, we have no hope of stopping it. Stopping her, if this Navalica really is responsible.”

  “She is,” Amber said grimly. But then he saw a hopeful spark in her eyes. “But maybe there’s a more direct way to get answers. Remember I told you about the fisherman I dreamed about this morning? The one bringing that box as, like, an offering to Navalica?”

  “Some kind of iron chest,” Miles said. “But you said you didn’t know what was in it. If you could describe it in detail, there might be clues—”

  “I’m not talking about the box. I’m talking about the man,” Amber said. “Norman Dunne. His son, Tommy, is a friend of mine.”

  Miles started the car, the engine growling to life. She was right. Research might be their only hope, but if there was a faster way to the answers they needed . . .

  “Where does he live?” he asked.

  “Head for the hospital,” Amber replied, putting on her seat belt. “His father had a heart attack yesterday. I saw Tommy when I was leaving, after I’d had my seizure. I’m betting his dad is still there.”

  Miles gripped the wheel, eyes narrowing as something clicked into place, like the tumblers of a lock lining up.

  “When, yesterday?”

  “What?”

  He turned to stare at her. “When did your friend’s father have his heart attack? Yesterday morning, you said, but do you know when, exactly?”

  “Why would I know that?”

  Miles put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb in front of Amber’s house. “If you saw him at the hospital right after your seizure, maybe Norman Dunne had his heart attack at the same time. According to your vision, he’s connected to Navalica. Maybe he had a seizure, too. Or something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  CHAPTER 11

  TOMMY Dunne was sick of the damn rain. On weekends and during bad storms he often slept until ten or eleven in the morning. During high school there had been Saturdays when he had stayed in bed until long after lunchtime had come and gone. But working with his father had gotten him into the habit of rising before dawn, which helped this morning. He had slept poorly and woken to find the weather had not improved. If anything, it had worsened.

  Last night, his father had collapsed in his hospital room. What he had been doing out of bed in the first place, Tommy had no idea, but he spent the night worrying. Instead of recovering from his heart attack, the old man seemed to be getting worse. According to the doctor he’d talked to just before going home last night, his father’s heart functions showed continued strain, but they were having trouble determining the cause. The doc had suggested it might be nothing but stress, but stress sure as hell hadn’t caused the initial heart attack, so that didn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of sense.

  Before his collapse, Norm Dunne had told his son to get back out into the water. Tommy expected nothing less. They were working fishermen, which meant if they weren’t out on the water, catching something they could sell, there wouldn’t be money to keep food on the table or a roof over their heads. Worse yet, the insurance Norm paid too much for every month was going to cover only a portion of his hospital stay and treatment. Tommy knew his father would be worrying about that more than anything, even his own health. But he couldn’t have taken the boat out yesterday afternoon—not with the way the tide had receded so far from shore. And though the tide had come back in during the night, the seas were so rough that he knew he would never be able to take her out by himself.

  In his heart, Tommy was happy to have the excuse. He didn’t give a shit about fish, or about the bills, or even the insurance. All he cared about was his dad. They had not always seen eye to eye, but without a mother in his life, his old man was all he had. He had never thought about it before, but thinking about his father having a heart attack—maybe dying—had made him understand that Norm Dunne wasn’t just his father, but his best friend. For a kid who’d rolled his eyes a thousand times at things his father had said, it had been a startling epiphany. But his father had been the one constant in his life. They were together through everything. The idea of losing him was almost too much to handle.

  After a fitful night’s sleep, Tommy had woken just after 5 A.M. He had rolled over and closed his eyes and waited, but sleep never returned, and so he had risen and made himself scrambled eggs and toast, showered and eaten breakfast, all the while watching the clock and waiting for visiting hours to begin at the hospital. But patience had never been his strong suit. He needed to see his father, to reassure himself that the fears that he had nursed overnight were unjustified.

  The windshield wipers swept sheets of rain off the glass as he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot. The hospital seemed dark, but he thought it must only be the gloom of the stormy morning—surely if they had lost power, they would have evacuated the patients and someone would have notified him. The phone hadn’t rung—not at home, and not his cell. Tommy parked and dug out his cell phone. Flipping it open, he saw that he had no signal at all, and the anxiety that had plag
ued him all night began to gnaw at his insides.

  He climbed out of the car and slammed the door, pocketing his keys and phone. As he ran for the shelter of the building, the rain felt hot and oily on his skin. It gave him the creeps.

  Sirens wailed, cutting through the roar and gust of the storm. Tommy glanced back and saw an ambulance headed for the emergency room doors, where two others sat silently, their lights flashing. For the first time he noticed the people hurrying back and forth from the open doors—doctors and EMTs moving patients on gurneys—and he wondered if that kind of ER traffic was normal. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he heard another siren rising in the distance.

  Then he had to get out of the hot rain. The doors slid open and he went into the lobby, where he stopped to blink in surprise at the number of people there. The benches and seats were all taken, and maybe two dozen people stood around the information desk. Others were passing through, whole families headed for the elevators. A few uniformed police officers were positioned in the lobby, and Tommy saw Lisa Landry—a reporter for the Hawthorne Letter interviewing a fortyish black woman with a bruised face and a bloodstained blouse. A guy with a fancy camera, complete with a huge flash contraption, was taking photos of the two women, and Tommy figured he must also work for the paper.

  Some strange shit had gone down in Hawthorne yesterday, but from the looks of the hospital lobby, the night had been much worse. And if the lobby looked like this, he couldn’t help but wonder how crammed the waiting rooms must be, never mind the ER.

  This is nuts, he thought, cutting through the throng and making his way to the elevator. There were so many people waiting that he couldn’t get on the first one and had to jam in with a large group to claim a spot on the second. Only when he had reached the fourth floor, where his father’s room was, and bypassed the waiting area, did he manage to escape the foot traffic.

  Tommy had always thought of hospitals as torture chambers. He’d had food poisoning once and been brought to the emergency room, where they had put him on one of those awful beds in which it was impossible to get comfortable. They’d given him drugs to stop him from puking and a saline IV to rehydrate him, but after the first hour he felt certain he would rather have been dry-heaving blood and stomach acid if it meant not having to spend another minute in that bed.

  Torture.

  As he strode down the corridor he found himself paying more attention than usual to the people around him. Visiting hours wouldn’t start for twenty minutes or so, but no one bothered to try to stop him. The nurses all looked troubled and some of them were obviously exhausted, their eyes punctuated with dark circles and their faces slack. There were orderlies whose expressions were closed off and grim, one of them with a nasty shiner. Something about them troubled Tommy, and it took him a few seconds to realize what it was—they were too damn quiet. They were all going about their duties like the walking wounded, like they had seen things they wished they hadn’t and were haunted by them.

  Somewhere nearby, a cell phone began to trill. Machines beeped. He glanced into rooms as he passed and saw that where there had been empty beds the previous evening, there were no longer any vacancies. Did his father have a new roommate? Probably.

  His shoe slipped on something and he flung out his arms, just managing to keep his balance. When he turned to see what he had slipped in, his nose wrinkled in disgust. Looks like piss. Smells like piss, too. And that last item was weird, considering how often people moved through these corridors with mops and disinfectants, making the whole place smell like medicine and death.

  With all of these troubling thoughts swirling in his head, he reached the door to his father’s room and froze, trying to make sense of the tableau before him. His father shouldn’t be out of bed. The doctors were trying to figure out why his heart kept racing and seizing. Unless he’d undergone a drastic change in his condition, he should be laid up, attached to machines . . .

  Tommy stared, his brain allowing him to see it all now.

  His father was still attached to the machines. Some of the monitors had pulled off his skin. The machines had been silenced, but their readouts were flashing alarming colors. Norm Dunne stood with his back to the door, dressed in pajamas that Tommy had brought from home. In his hands, he held a metal IV stand, and as Tommy looked on, his father raised it over his head like a hatchet and brought it down.

  Norm Dunne had gotten a roommate overnight after all. And now he was trying to kill the man.

  “Jesus, Dad, no!” Tommy shouted.

  But the IV stand came down again, this time with a sickening crunch, and when Norm swung it upward, droplets of blood flew from the metal. The old Hispanic guy in the bed groaned and began to pant like a dog, maybe the only noise he could make—full of pain and terror and desperate sorrow—and Norm paused and cocked his head as if listening to a melody that pleased him.

  Tommy stood paralyzed, unable to move or speak beyond his initial shout. In utter horror and confusion, he shook his head, trying to deny what he was seeing. He heard footsteps coming from the corridor behind him, someone at last responding to the silenced alarm on the machine that monitored his father’s heart.

  His father tensed to swing the IV stand again.

  “Dad, stop!” Tommy snapped, bolting at his father, his voice and body unfrozen. Images of their shared past filled his mind—his dad wiping away a tear when he brought Tommy to his first day of school . . . throwing a football in the backyard in the twilight of a long summer day, still smelling of fish guts . . . chauffeuring Tommy and Annie Slason on their first date in the sixth grade, wearing the black chauffeur hat and everything . . . teaching Tommy how to work the nets, and putting salve on the abrasions on his hands after that first day . . .

  His father turned on him, snarling, holding the IV stand like a baseball bat. His eyes had turned black as tar, and at their centers were pinpoints of bright light like distant stars. Norm Dunne stared at his son as if he had nursed a hatred for him all of his life.

  “For the goddess,” his father said, black fluid dribbling from his lips, turning his voice into a wet growl.

  Then his father lunged, cocking the IV stand.

  Tommy got the hell out. He hurled himself backward, turning to flee the room. He hurtled into the corridor, slamming into a young nurse, who staggered back and crashed into the opposite wall. Off balance, Tommy careened across the hall and lost his footing, went sprawling into an empty gurney, then pushed off and bolted.

  But he had lost precious seconds.

  “Mr. Dunne, what are you—” the nurse began.

  And then she screamed, and the IV stand swept down toward her. Every ounce of sense Tommy had ever had told him to run, but he couldn’t let his father do to the nurse what he’d done to the old man. He reversed direction, threw out an arm, and stopped the IV stand as it came down. Twisting it around, he held on with both hands, using it as a bar to shove his father back. As a teenager, he had wondered how much stronger he would have to grow, and how much older his father would have to get, before he would be able to take his old man.

  Tommy hadn’t gotten there yet.

  Norm yanked the IV stand toward him with one hand, and with the other he smashed a fist into Tommy’s face, breaking his nose and splitting his lip. Norm tore the IV stand from his grasp and hit him again, this time with such force that the blow drove Tommy to his knees.

  “Dad, please,” Tommy said, looking up at his father’s black, pinpoint eyes. “Stop.”

  Norm grabbed a fistful of his son’s hair, hoisted Tommy off the floor, and hit him again. And again. Blood flowed from Tommy’s nose and mouth. He could taste the copper tang of it on his tongue. Blackness swam in at the edges of his vision. When his father picked him up by his shirt and belt, Tommy could not fight back.

  His father hurled him into the wall. Something cracked inside Tommy Dunne, and he slammed down on top of the gurney in the hall, then tumbled off it and hit the linoleum. His eyes flickered open and close
d and he saw a pool of his own blood forming around him. He heard shouting and retreating feet, and he thought his father must be running.

  He killed me, Tommy thought. My dad killed me.

  And then he slid into oblivion.

  KEOMANY watched as Octavian scanned the jammed visitor parking lot at Hawthorne Union Hospital for a second or two, then turned up the drive reserved for ambulances and other emergency vehicles. He drove onto the grass alongside that lane and killed the engine.

  “You’re just going to park on the hospital lawn?” Keomany asked as he popped open his door and began to climb out into the rain.

  Octavian glanced back inside at her. “Daybreak hasn’t given us much of a reprieve. No more wasting time.” He gave her a mischievous grin. “Besides, I think most of the town’s a little too busy to worry about towing my car.”

  He swung the door shut.

  In the backseat, Charlotte snickered. “I know I was, like, made to hate him. But I totally want him,” she said, in a just-us-girls conspiratorial tone that made Keomany wince. “The swagger just gets me, y’know?”

  Keomany opened her door, glancing into the backseat. “Again, he’s in a relationship.”

  Charlotte smiled, fangs glinting in the gloom of the car. “He’s been around practically since the Dark Ages. My guess is he’s had a lot of relationships and outlived them all.”

  “Listen—” Keomany snapped.

  “Please, don’t lecture me,” Charlotte said, rolling her eyes. “The guy’s yummy. Let’s not pretend being around him doesn’t get you buzzing in all the right places. If you’re not going to act on it, that’s fine. All the more for me.”

  The vampire girl opened her door and plunged into the storm with inhuman swiftness, leaving the door hanging open. Keomany climbed out, shut both doors, and started after her. She didn’t want to seem like she was chasing Charlotte, but the hot rain felt so slick and viscous on her skin that she ran just to be out of it.