Nightmare City Read Free Page B

on The Cooper Practice . Nothing new about that. Nothing strange at all.
    But where had Mom gone off to after she turned the TV on?
    Tom found the remote lying on one of the chairs. He picked it up and clicked the TV off.
    “Mom?” he shouted.
    But no—no answer here either. There was just the same silence as there was upstairs: that silence that made him feel the place was empty.
    All right , he thought. Enough of this stupidity. Let’s find out what’s going on. Right now .
    Tom jogged upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pausing only to hit the light switch at the top. ( Electricity costs money , he could practically hear his mom say.)
    He swung round the corner. Jogged down the hall. Up the stairs again. Back into his bedroom. He retrieved his cell phone from where it was still lying on the worktable. He hit the button to call up his speed-dial list.
    “What?” Tom whispered aloud into the silent house.
    The speed-dial list was empty.
    All right. Must’ve accidentally erased the list. Or something. No big deal. He went into his contacts list.
    Again Tom spoke out loud, more than a whisper this time: “What. Is. Going. On?”
    His contacts list had been completely erased as well.
    For a second, Tom actually considered the possibility he was still dreaming. Sure, why not? You see stuff like that in the movies, right? Guy has a scary dream, sees a monster. Then he thinks he wakes up; he thinks he’s safe. Then— Frang!— the monster leaps out at him, and it turns out heonly dreamed he was waking up and he’s still in the nightmare. Maybe it was like that, Tom thought: he had dreamed he was in heaven and then . . .
    But he looked up and his eyes traveled around the room, his room. His familiar room with everything where it ought to be. And he knew this was real, this was really happening. It was no dream.
    Okay , he thought. Don’t panic. Think. You’re a reporter. Find the answer. Figure it out .
    He knew his mom’s number by heart. She had told him once: The problem with speed dials and contacts lists is that you never need to memorize a phone number . And he had said: Why would you ever want to memorize a phone number? And she had said: Well, in case you’re lost somewhere without your phone . And he had replied sarcastically: Yeah, Mom. Like that’s gonna happen!
    But all the same, Mom wasn’t a big worrier, so when she did worry, it stuck in his head. He’d memorized her number one day, just in case.
    He dialed the number now.
    As the phone started ringing against his ear, he moved back out of the room, back down the hall to the stairs. He was just starting down the stairs again as the ringing stopped.
    And there—hallelujah!—there was Mom, her voice coming over the phone: “Tom?”
    Tom rolled his eyes with relief. “Mom! There you are!”
    “Tom, can you hear me?” Mom said.
    “Yeah, I’m right here,” he said into the phone loudly. “Where are you?”
    “Tom! Tom, are you hearing me?”
    “Mom, I’m right here!” he shouted. “Can you hear me? I’m at home. Where are you?”
    There was a pause. Then something awful happened, something that made Tom’s stomach go hollow with fear. He was just coming off the last stair into the front hall again when he heard Mom say, “Oh, Tom, please say you hear me! Please! Please . . .”
    Tom opened his mouth to answer her, but only a whisper came out. “Mom?”
    Mom was crying. He could hear it. She was crying hard. And that was bad. Mom almost never cried. Mom was a girl, and a very girly girl, but there was something really tough about her, too, something really strong. She cried when they buried Burt. She cried when the lieutenant colonel handed her the folded flag from Burt’s coffin, the overlong, coffin-sized flag that now hung on Tom’s bedroom wall. She cried then, sure. Tom cried, too. Everybody cried, even the lieutenant colonel. But that’s what it took—that’s how much it took to make Mom break down in tears. Other than