Nightmare City Read Online Free Page A

the fog began to blow and roll across her. The swirling white mist began to thicken around her. It began to cover her over. She began to fade into it, her features becoming dim, her figure becoming more shadowy, harder to see. As Tom watched, dumbstruck, she began to disappear from view.
    No! thought Tom.
    He grabbed the door, pulled it open, and rushed outside.

4.
    T om felt the cold and damp of the day on his face as he broke from the house. He moved quickly to the driveway, quickly down the driveway toward the street where the woman in the white blouse was standing. Even as he hurried toward her, she seemed to fade away from him, to fade back into the swirling fog.
    “Hey, wait!” he shouted, waving his hand.
    But the woman didn’t answer him. With that same eerily dead look on her face, she slowly began to turn to one side.
    “Hey!” Tom called, jogging faster down the driveway toward her. “Hey, hold on a second, would you?!”
    No answer—and the woman started walking away.
    Tom felt another sickening thrill of fear. Something was really wrong with this. Something about this woman was really wrong. The emptiness of her expression. The way she didn’t answer him, didn’t respond to his shouts at all. The slow, deliberate way in which she stepped now into the turning, moving mist.
    Tom ran faster. As he neared the end of the drive, the fog began to close around him. He felt it, clammy on his face and his arms.
    “Hold on!” he cried out to the woman again.
    She seemed not to hear him. She took another step down the road, into the fog, away from him. Her figure grew dimmer as the whiteness closed over her. But then, suddenly, as Tom kept running toward her, she turned her head. She looked directly at him! The fog thinned for just a moment, and he got a good look at her face.
    Tom gasped out loud. He had that feeling he got when an elevator went down too fast—as if he were falling but his stomach was staying in one place.
    Because he knew her! He recognized her! He couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered her voice, all right. He had just heard her voice a little while ago.
    I need to talk to you. It’s very important . . .
    It was the woman who had called him just this morning. The woman whose call had woken him from his dream. He remembered her insistent voice over the phone . . .
    Please!
    . . . her voice reaching out to him through that strange static, reaching out urgently as if from someplace very far away.
    But what was her name? He knew it. Why couldn’t he remember?
    “Wait, please!” he shouted.
    But the woman only stared at him one instant more. Then she turned and walked into the fog and the fog gathered thickly around her. Tom had one last glimpse of her. Then she faded to a misty figure. Then the fog swallowed her, and she was gone.
    Tom didn’t hesitate. He ran after her. He plunged after her into the fog.
    A moment—a step—and the murk of white surrounded him. The slimy damp chilled his skin. The thick mist cut off his vision almost entirely. For another second or two as he ran, he could see the curb beside the Colliers’ lawn—then even that, barely a few yards away, disappeared under the churning marine layer.
    All the same, at first, Tom didn’t think about it. All hethought about was catching up to the woman, finding out who she was, what she wanted. Over and above his fears, that pulse of curiosity—that need to get the answers—was pounding in him now. He was desperate just to talk to someone, just to ask some living person what on earth was going on.
    He kept running. The woman had been moving so slowly, she couldn’t have gotten far away. Even stumbling blindly through the mist as he was, Tom was sure to catch up to her if he stayed on the road.
    But he didn’t catch up to her. It was strange. More than strange. He ran for several more seconds, his sneakers slapping the macadam as he charged deeper and deeper into the ever-thickening mist. But there was no sign of