Somehow John knew this face. An older part of him, buried within the dream child, had hoped never to see its terrible visage again.
Do you remember me, John Fogg? it asked, its pointed teeth clicking and clacking as it spoke.
John remained silent, carefully backing away, back toward the dark department store windows.
Your silence speaks volumes, the monster said with a chilling laugh as it began to casually stroll toward him, joined by more shadows that detached themselves from the shimmering black mass. And I’m not alone, John.
John wanted to run—but where? He looked about, desperate to find a safer place, but saw only darkness, darkness that pulsed and moved as if alive. Darkness that throbbed and stretched like the skin on the belly of some great beast, ready to disgorge its babies into the nightmare world.
There’s nowhere for you now, John, the nightmare man said. You are trapped here, with us.
The creature stopped and stood in the middle of Herald Square, waiting for the other monsters that continued to crawl from the shadows.
John found them familiar as well, and felt his terror grow even more. Painful flashes of memory thrummed within the core of his being like the plucked string of a badly tuned instrument. He saw himself as an adult, as he dealt with each of the demonic things that were gathering in the street before him.
They were minor supernatural pests, the demonic equivalent of fruit flies, but they were still annoying, and potentially dangerous. And he had disposed of them, performing rites of exorcism that had removed them from the earthly realm, depositing them—he now realized—in this nightmarish place.
We always said we would pay you back in kind, the monstrous leader spoke. If we ever had the chance.
The darkness around John continued to birth more things that shambled, crawled, flew, and hopped. He had nowhere to go. Everywhere he looked, there was danger.
And now we do. With that, the leader’s jaw snapped loudly and the creature started toward him, a wave of jabbering nightmare following in his wake.
John could do nothing but stare, imagining the horror that was about to overwhelm him. He didn’t turn around, but he could hear other things converging on him from behind. And then accepting his fate, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, tensed, but ready for the nightmare that was certain to never end.
A sudden sound made him cringe. At first, he thought it might have been some sort of prehistoric beast baying its joy as it was about to consume him in a single bite, but then he recognized it as the blare of a truck horn.
John opened his eyes to find the leader, and the flow of shadowy entities, mere inches from him. He turned in the direction of the nearly deafening horn, and saw an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the street, right into the beasts, scattering some like road waste, while crushing others beneath its large wheels.
Falling backward onto the wet street, John looked up in awe as the truck ground to a halt, brakes screeching as it skidded upon the crushed bodies of the demonic entities that had been crossing the street to claim him. The door of the truck’s cab swung open to reveal the driver, and John could not help smiling.
“Quickly now,” the old woman ordered, holding out her hand. John immediately reached for her and Nana Fogg grasped his wrist, hoisting him up into the cab with ease. “Close the door. My interference won’t keep them at bay for long,” she said. Then she gunned the engine, and with a roar the truck was moving again, crushing more of the monstrosities as they threw themselves at it.
John could only stare at the silver-haired old woman, who worked the clutch as if she’d been doing it her entire life. “You saved me,” was all he could manage. Where once his chest had expanded with fear, now it was filled with a nearly overwhelming love for his Nana, who had saved him—
Again.
Margarite Alice Fogg—Nana—had always looked out for him.
As a small child, he had found the arms of the tall, statuesque woman who wore her silver hair in a tight bun at the back of her head far more comforting than those of his parents. Nana Fogg always knew how to make things right. She’d chased away bad dreams and wiped away his tears. She’d even stood up to his overbearing father who had never seemed to have enough patience with his overly sensitive son.
And she had continued to watch over him, even after her death, when she’d warned him from beyond the grave of a vengeful spirit’s plan to set fire to his college dormitory. Now here she was, saving him from demons in the realm between life and death.
“You’re driving a truck.” John suddenly realized the strangeness of the situation.
“One uses what one has on hand,” the old woman said, checking the side-view mirror for stragglers. “Would have used a jet plane if it had been handy.” Nana looked at him then, her gray eyes swimming with emotion. “We need to get you out of this place.”
“But we’re safe now,” John said. He watched through the expanse of windshield as the city changed, the buildings of New York growing less and less defined. “Right, Nana? We’re safe?”
His grandmother’s boney hands clutched the large steering wheel as she drove them farther into a world of blackness. “For now,” she reassured him. “But we have to get you home before she—”
John was confused. “Who?” he asked aloud. And then with a sudden rush of emotion, he remembered. “Theodora,” he whispered.
They were immersed in a universe of shadow now.
“Is she all right?” John asked, frightened by the look of worry he saw on his grandmother’s pale face. “Nana?”
“I don’t know, John,” Nana said finally, her eyes on the darkness ahead as if she was concentrating on something that he could not see. “Since you escaped them . . .” She stopped talking and stepped on the gas, sending the great truck leaping through the shadows.
“What, Nana? Tell me—what will they do?”
“Since they’ve lost you, they’ll look for the next best thing,” the old woman said. “They want to hurt you, John—in any way they can.”
The fear was back inside him, ready to consume him with the horrific realization.
“They’ll go after your wife.”
John Fogg’s eyes snapped open, the blare of a truck’s horn fading in the distance. He tried to move, but there was only pain and a terrible numbness that told him things were not right.
That things were terribly wrong.
Eyes that felt as though they’d been rolled in sand before being placed inside his skull darted about, trying to adjust to his surroundings.
Where?
A woman whom he did not recognize moved about a room that he did not know as he lay in a bed that felt unfamiliar to his body. John tried to speak, but the only sound he could make was like the rustling of dry fall leaves.
The woman moved too quickly for his eyes to capture, but then they found her at the side of the bed, pushing buttons on machines that chimed and beeped with her touch. Tubes trailed from the machines, and his eyes followed them down to where they disappeared into the flesh of his exposed arm.
RV, his soggy mind defined. Got an RV in my arm.
He knew that was wrong when an image of his Nana waving from the driver’s seat of a monstrous recreational vehicle spattered with the blood of the demonic exploded inside his head, making him gasp aloud.
The woman was suddenly hovering over him.
“IV,” he croaked. “IV—not RV.”
“That’s right, Mr. Fogg,” the woman said, placing a gentle hand upon his chest and pushing him back down to the bed. He wasn’t even aware that he had been trying to sit up.
“What . . . ,” he began, but lost his train of thought as his eyes again scanned the unfamiliar room.
A hospital room. He was in a hospital.
“There was an accident,” the woman was saying, her hand still firmly on his chest. “Do you remember anything about that?”
At first he didn’t, but then the images rushed in: a flood of staccato moments that made h
is body thrash and the machines beside his bed protest with furious beeps and alarms.
His team . . . his wife . . . He didn’t want to see this—he didn’t want to remember. Someone was screaming, a raw, ragged sound. It took him a while to realize it was him.
There were more people in the room now, rushing around his bed, trying to keep him down. They were doing something to his RV—IV, and he felt himself begin to slip away again, the slide show of utter carnage growing less distinct, the corners of the nightmarish images growing darker, obscuring what he no longer wanted to see.
He tried to remain conscious, fighting with everything he had so that his question might be answered.
“My wife,” he managed. A thin man in a white lab coat turned his shaggy head to look him in the eye. “My . . . wife,” John croaked again, just as the world fell out from beneath him and a yawning oblivion drew him down.
But not before he’d seen the look in the man’s eyes, and he took it with him on his journey to nothing.
It was a look of sympathy.
John Fogg sat in a chair by the window in his hospital room, refusing to look at the bed that had been his prison for the last six weeks.
He was afraid that if he did look at it, the bed would draw him back into its embrace, whispering that it was not yet time for him to go, that there was still much more healing to be done.
As if in solidarity, his broken ankle encased in a walking cast throbbed painfully.
The doctors had told him that it was still too early for him to be mobile, but they had cut him some slack, considering his situation.
His situation.
John looked at his watch. Where is Stephan?
“Ready?” Stephan asked from the doorway as if he’d heard John’s unspoken question.
“I’ve been ready for quite some time,” John grumbled, pushing off from the chair. He winced in pain from multiple places all over his body.
“Use the cane,” Stephan reminded him. “Remember what the doctor told you.”
“I know what the doctor told me,” John snapped, grabbing for the cane that leaned against the windowsill. Instead his hand brushed it, sending the cane crashing to the floor. On reflex, he reached for it, and nearly lost his balance, managing to steady himself by grasping the windowsill with an agonized hiss as pain stabbed through his ankle.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Stephan asked as he retrieved the cane.
John attempted to snatch it from Stephan’s grasp, perhaps a bit too roughly, but Stephan held on. “I’m fine,” he said curtly.
“No, you’re not,” Stephan replied, releasing the cane, causing John to stumble slightly. “And as soon as you recognize that, you’ll be in a much better place.”
They glowered at each other for a moment, before John begrudgingly accepted that the man was right, but he was in no mood to admit it aloud.
“Could you get my bag?” he asked instead, forcing calmness into his tone. “It’s over by the bed.”
Stephan did what was asked of him, as he always had done. Barely thirty years old, Stephan Vasjak nearly single-handedly managed all the business affairs of Rising Fogg Productions, as well as the rather hectic schedules of John and Theodora’s personal lives. John wasn’t sure what he would have done without Stephan there to guide him, and he knew that Theodora would . . .
The reality of the moment hit him like a sledgehammer and again, he nearly lost his balance.
“John?” Stephan was in front of him, suitcase in hand. “Are you all right—do you need a minute?”
John shook his head vehemently. “No, no more minutes. I have to do this now or . . .”
Stephan gently took his arm and guided him toward the door. “We,” he corrected. “It’s we who have to do this. C’mon, I’m parked out back, not far from a maintenance exit.”
“Are they still camped out there?” John asked wearily.
“Oh yes,” Stephan answered. “The paparazzi and the institutions they serve continue their voracious pursuit of pain and misery.”
“Thought they might’ve lost interest by now.”
“Not a chance,” Stephan said as they entered the service elevator. “The fact that they haven’t been able to talk to you or . . .” He stopped speaking and stared pointedly at the LED display as it counted down the floors.
John’s lower leg was throbbing again as he leaned on his cane. The longer he was up, the louder his ankle objected. “Where did you say you were parked again?” he asked, breaking the uneasy silence.
“Just out back,” Stephan said as the doors slid open. “Hopefully Dr. Snider wasn’t planning on using his space or we might be walking farther than we thought,” he continued as they headed out an unwatched side door.
Stephan’s Audi was right where he’d left it. “Must be a golf day,” the man said, unlocking the car with the push of a button on his key.
John lowered himself into the soft leather of the front seat as Stephan put his suitcase in the trunk.
“Need some help?” Stephan asked.
“I’m good.” John carefully lifted his casted leg and pulled it into the car.
“Set?”
“Yeah.”
Their eyes met as Stephan leaned in to close the passenger door.
“Thank you,” John said suddenly. “For everything.”
“No sweat.” John’s personal assistant shrugged as he slammed the door closed and hurried around to the driver’s side.
Stephan started the car, then sat for a moment as the engine thrummed and Freddy Mercury sang about a Killer Queen over the satellite radio.
“Are we ready for this?” he asked quietly, not looking at John.
John’s eyes were locked on the brick wall of the hospital that had been his home for the last several weeks. A small part of him would have liked to go back to his room and accept the painkillers that would send him to that wonderful, womblike place that only narcotics could create.
But then, what would happen to his wife?
“I think we have to be ready,” John finally answered his friend with a deep breath, and Stephan backed from the parking space, beginning a journey that both were anticipating and dreading with equal measure.
The look that John had read as one of sympathy that day so long ago when he first awakened had been exactly that. Something had indeed happened to his wife that Halloween evening, but it wasn’t until he was stronger that anyone had shared the details with him.
He remembered the doctors prefacing the discussion by saying that her primary injuries were not life-threatening, that he had sustained much worse. And then they had paused, which had made him all the more anxious and angry.
He’d demanded to know her condition, and they’d finally told him.
There had been an official investigation into what had happened in the House of Tribulation that Halloween night, and the conclusion had been that a gas leak had caused an explosion that had taken the lives of most of the Spirit Chasers crew. John had said nothing to refute those reports, nor did he correct the doctors when they kept describing his wife’s injuries as caused by the explosion. However, their reports of her actual condition continued to confuse him. They kept telling him that she was stable, yet she remained unconscious. And when the countless tests had been run, and still there was no apparent reason why Theodora Knight Fogg was not awake, they had stopped looking and transferred her to another hospital.
“Did you call this morning?” Stephan asked, interrupting John’s thoughts.
“Yeah, no change.”
Theodora had been sent to the Cho Institute, at the urging of Dr. Franklin Cho, a friend of the family who thought he might be able to help her, so John had agreed to the move. He’d called Dr. Cho at least five times a day since then, each time hearing the same rhetoric in Dr. Cho’s oh so patient style. “Still no change, but we’re preparing a new round of tests that we hope will . . .”
Elvis Costello was singing about something to do with angels wanting to we
ar red shoes as John tried to prepare himself for this visit to his wife. It would be the first time he had seen her since the incident that had nearly killed them, and he needed to be strong.
For the umpteenth time he thought of his Nana’s words.
They’ll go after your wife.
Is that why she won’t wake up? he wondered as they drove. Were his past battles with the forces of darkness somehow responsible?
“We’re here,” Stephan announced.
They drove up a heavily wooded road and around a corner, where they came upon a tall wrought-iron gate, the sprawling Cho Institute on the other side. A security guard approached the car with a friendly smile as Stephan brought his window down. The guard’s name tag said he was Max, and he checked a clipboard in his hand to confirm that they were indeed welcome there, before opening the gates to allow them through.
“Have a good visit,” Max said with a wave as Stephan drove past.
John sincerely doubted that would be the case.
Stephan parked not too far from the institute’s entrance and helped John climb out of the car with a minimal amount of pain.
“You good?” he asked, handing John his cane.
“Yeah,” John said, looking past the man to the imposing structure before him. He was already anticipating the heavy, antiseptic smells familiar to places like this, and the oppressive atmosphere, as if a powerful storm was brewing, only this time, in this place, it would rain misery.
It took him a few tries to get going, his body stiff and protesting, but he managed, slowly loosening up as he walked beside Stephan toward a ramp that snaked around the side of the building.
Just as they reached the front doors, John’s cell phone began to ring. He fished it from his jacket pocket and felt his heart rate quicken as he saw who was calling.
“Yes, Doctor,” he answered as Stephan watched him with a cautious eye.