The nightmare feast anot.., p.1
The Nightmare Feast (Another Kingdom), page 1
THE NIGHTMARE FEAST
TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
THE NIGHTMARE FEAST (BOOK 2 IN THE ANOTHER KINGDOM SERIES)
Copyright © 2019 Amalgamated Metaphor.
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Mark Swan
Book design: Karen Sheets de Gracia
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Klavan, Andrew, author.
Title: The nightmare feast / Andrew Klavan.
Description: Nashville : Turner Publishing Company, 2020. | Series: Another kingdom ; book 2 | Summary: “Austin Lively is on the hunt—and on the run. With a pair of hitmen on his trail in California, and an evil wizard coming after him in the Eleven Lands, Austin is trying to complete a dual quest”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025028 (print) | LCCN 2019025029 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684422661 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684422678 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684422685 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3561.L334 N55 2020 (print) | LCC PS3561.L334 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025028
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025029
9781684422678 Hardcover
9781684422661 Paperback
9781684422685 eBook
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
19 20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is for Jonathan and Erica Hay,
a token of my friendship
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
“WE SHALL NOT CEASE FROM EXPLORATION
AND THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING
WILL BE TO ARRIVE WHERE WE STARTED
AND KNOW THE PLACE FOR THE FIRST TIME.”
—T.S. ELIOT, “FOUR QUARTETS”
1
SO NOW I WAS A HUNTED MAN. HUNTED, HAUNTED, brokenhearted. I looked in the motel mirror. Was that really me? I was thirty years old, and I looked like death. Like death on a Monday morning after a weekend binge.
A week ago—four days ago even—I was Austin Lively, boy failure, Hollywood schmuck. A wannabe moviemaker who never made a movie. A writer who sold one script straight out of film school then faded away to become the shadow of an LA nobody. I was a reader for a crappy production company named Mythos. I was also a hypochondriacal depressive who had lost all hope of ever having the big career of his dreams.
Funny: I never thought I would miss being a dreamless hypochondriacal depressive nobody. But those were the days, all right. Now? My life was gone. My job was gone. My friends were gone. The cops were trying to pin a murder on me. An all-powerful billionaire, Serge Orosgo, wanted me dead. My family—my mom, my dad, my brother—were all in Orosgo’s pay. Only my kid sister Riley was above suspicion, and guess what? She was nuts. Plus she’d gone missing. Even her insane conspiracy videos had vanished off the internet.
And all that trouble I was in? That was just in this world, the real world.
What other world was there? Glad you asked. Galiana. The Eleven Lands. A magical, mystical brain tumor of a hallucination I seemed to walk into without warning from time to time. Could happen any time I went through a door. And if things were crap here, believe me, it was nothing compared to the way they were in that lunatic fantasy. The woman who loved me there—Lady Betheray, the woman I was supposed to defend and protect—was dead, murdered. Her husband, Lord Iron, the tyrant of the country, and Curtin, his pet wizard, wanted to capture and torture me. I was supposed to be on a quest to find the emperor, Anastasius, who would restore the wise queen, Elinda, to her throne. I know—it sounded ridiculous to me too. But ridiculous or not, it was a job for a knight in shining armor—“a fighting man of brave heart and right belief”—not some SoCal dickhead in a cheap motel.
That’s where I was now. A motel so cheap they let me pay in cash. A run-down hole on a small highway just south of Salinas. I was waiting for darkfall there so I could finish my run to the Bay Area. It was too dangerous to try it in daylight. The cops might be on the lookout for me. And Orosgo’s bald-headed thug—the guy I called Billiard Ball—was almost certainly on my trail as well.
But somehow I had to get there. Had to find my sister. Had to find the manuscript she might or might not have, the novel called Another Kingdom, which seemed to have some power to connect this crazy world to that crazy other one.
I turned away from the mirror. I looked around the room. Room Six in the Shangri-la Motel: a cinderblock rectangle. The cinderblocks were painted urine yellow. The carpet was sewage brown. There was a double bed with a floral bedspread that was mingled green and red, sort of like vomit. There was a particleboard dresser with a lamp on it under the mirror. There was a TV and a cheap table and a couple of cheap chairs. There was a locked door that I guess connected to the next room over.
Beside the table, there was a small window. It looked out onto the parking lot and onto the rest of the one-story, U-shaped, barracks-like motel. Through the misty veil of the privacy curtains, I could watch the light dying over the drab highway.
As soon as dark came, I’d be on the road again.
I moved to the bed. I lay down on the vomit-colored bedspread, my hands clasped behind my head. I looked up at the ceiling. My heart felt like ashes. That was the odd thing about Galiana. It was an acid-trip of a fantasy world filled with ogres and centaurs and fairies and the like. It couldn’t be real. But when you came back, you brought your wounds with you, and the wounds were real. And so was your grief.
My hand went to the chain I wore around my neck, down to the golden locket that hung on the end of it. It had belonged to Betheray. I pulled the chain up over my head and held the locket up in front of me. I pressed the clasp and the locket opened. There was a portrait inside, a miniature painting of Queen Elinda. I gazed on her serene and regal and exquisitely feminine face. Engraved on the locket’s other half was a coat of arms—a sword across an open hand—and the queen’s motto: Let Wisdom Reign and Each Man Go His Way.
I reread the words. I could hear my mother’s arch response: “What’s wisdom, I wonder.”
I had no idea.
As I lay there gazing at the picture, I thought I felt a strange heat coming off the metal of the locket, a strange power. It seemed to grow heavier in my hand, heavy as a stone.
Quickly, on instinct, I snapped the locket shut and held it tight.
And something happened. Something weird. For a moment, I lost myself in a kind of rapt otherness. The motel room disappeared from around me. I was in a different place, a place I knew: the house where I’d grown up in Berkeley. The living room. I could see it. I could hear a child crying—not just crying—screaming—hysterical—terrified. It was so real, so startling, I loosed my hold on the locket and let it drop to my chest.
At once, the otherness—the image—the memory—whatever it was—vanished. I was back in the motel, back on the bed. When I tentatively picked up the locket again, it wasn’t heavy anymore, no power came off it. The experience was over. It had lasted only a second. It was easy to convince myself that I had imagined it. Just nerves, that’s all.
So I lay there, holding the locket, thinking of Betheray, missing her, blaming myself for not being man enough to protect her. I watched as the shadows in the small room shifted, as the evening came on outside.
Then, finally, it was dark. Time to go. With the locket still in my hand, I rolled off the bed. There was nothing to pack; I had nothing with me. I’d ditched my phone so no one could trace me. I’d stopped at an ATM near LA to stock up on cash. I couldn’t use credit cards. They could trace those too. I’d dismantled the GPS in my car. No internet. No social media. I was invisible—and I was utterly alone.
I crossed the shit-brown carpet to the door. I opened the door onto the night outside. There was Billiard Ball.
He stood gigantically on the threshold, framed in the doorway with the parking lot lights glaring behind him.
Before I could react, he jabbed me in the neck with a stun gun. The electr
2
I DROPPED TO THE CARPET, JERKING AND SHUDDERING. My muscles were locked up, immobile. All I could do was lie there and judder and watch as Billiard Ball stepped calmly into the room and calmly shut the door behind him.
His enormous shoulders were packed into a leather jacket. His muscles bulged through the thin sweater he wore underneath. He looked down at my quivering body without a smile, without a sneer, without any emotion at all. He hardly seemed interested in what he saw.
He reached into his jacket and slid the little stun gun into his left inside pocket. Then he reached across into his right inside pocket and drew out a small leather case.
Terror exploded inside me as I watched him unzip the case and deftly remove a syringe.
I made a horrible, helpless gurgling noise in my throat as I battled to get control of my body. It was no use. My muscles had been severed from my will. Billiard Ball was going to poison me, kill me, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop him. They would find me in this crappy motel room, dead of what seemed like natural causes. My mother and father would pretend it was a tragedy. My brother would tell himself it couldn’t be helped. The police would lie. No one would ever know that Orosgo had had me murdered to preserve his crazy plan to establish The Orosgo Age, a utopia on earth. I had to move. I had to run. I had to—but I couldn’t. My muscles were strung out tight.
Billiard Ball knelt at my feet. He laid the syringe on the carpet. He calmly untied my right sneaker. He calmly removed my sock. Like a mother undressing a toddler. He was going to inject me between the toes where no one would find the needle mark.
I gurgled. I struggled. I made a high-pitched screech of useless effort. I could not move anything.
And then I could. A little. My hand, the fingers of my right hand. By focusing all my effort, all my will, into my fingers, I could stretch them out even as they went on trembling violently. I could bend my right wrist—just a little. That horrid, helpless noise kept spitting out between my teeth as I battled to shift my forearm.
Meanwhile, Billiard Ball finished taking off my sock. He set it down on the floor by his left knee, next to the sneaker he’d already removed. It was all very neat, very efficient. He wanted to be able to find the sock and sneaker quickly so he could put them back on my corpse after I was dead.
I moved my hand across the carpet. A little. Half an inch.
I touched something. Something cold. The locket! Betheray’s locket. I had dropped it when I fell. I fought to close my fingers around it. It was like bending bars of iron. My whole body shook violently with the effort, my spine thrumming like a bowstring. But slowly, slowly, slowly, my fingers closed.
Having set my sock down beside my sneaker, Billiard Ball now turned to pick up the syringe lying on the carpet by his right knee.
I closed my hand. I gripped the locket in my fist. Like an explosion, I felt that odd power radiate off the metal again. The power pulsed into my flesh. Flashes of vision interrupted the reality of the moment. The house where I grew up. The living room. A child screaming somewhere. I fought to stay focused on the real world, the motel, my swiftly approaching murder …
The power of the locket flowed into my hand, my wrist, my arm, giving me more strength. I lifted the locket from the floor. It felt heavy, as it had before. Heavy as a rock.
Billiard Ball sniffed absent-mindedly as he lifted the syringe in his right hand and held it upward, needle pointing at the ceiling. Working in a deadpan, business-like manner, he used his left hand to pry my big toe away from the toe beside it, to make a space where he could inject me. He brought the syringe’s needle down toward my foot.
I flicked my arm and threw the locket at him.
It was a good throw. Or maybe his head, leaning down over his homicidal work, just gave me a big target. Or maybe there was some Galianan magic in the locket itself. I don’t know. But the locket—the locket with its extra heavy load of bizarro energy—smacked hard into the thug’s temple.
The blow knocked Billiard Ball’s head to one side. Both of his hands flew up into the air reflexively. He let out a cry of pain and surprise: “Ah!”
He dropped the syringe.
It fell onto the carpet to the left of me. With a great shout and a mighty effort, I threw my arm across my body, my shoulder lifting with the motion. I found the syringe and grabbed hold of the barrel.
All this took less than a second—but long enough for Billiard Ball to recover from his surprise. A flicker of annoyance crossed his face as he saw me go for the syringe. He reached out and clamped his hand around my wrist in a grip of steel. He held me fast. There was no way I could get the syringe anywhere near him.
So I shifted my hand in his grip, bent the wrist, aimed the needle at him, and pressed the plunger down with my thumb.
Whatever poison was in the tube squirted out in a thin, steady stream. I pointed the stream at his face, then bent my wrist further and slashed the stream across his nose until it hit him smack in the eye.
Billiard Ball let out a monstrous roar of pain. He let me go and clutched at his eye with both hands. His huge body fell sideways against the bed.
My muscles were still stiff and half frozen. Grunting loudly, I managed to turn myself over onto my side, then my belly. I dropped the empty syringe and pressed both palms into the carpet. I pushed myself up. It felt as if there were a huge block of cement on my back. I crawled a few inches, just trying to put some distance between me and the killer in that tiny room.
I reached the particleboard dresser. I could hear Billiard Ball cursing in pain behind me, but I didn’t look back. I grabbed the dresser, the drawer handles. I dragged myself up to my knees. Letting out another shout of desperate effort, I grabbed hold of the dresser top and hauled myself to my feet. My legs felt like spaghetti under me. I had to will the strength back into them.
I saw my image rise into the mirror as I rose. A face like a corpse, three days buried.
I heard a noise behind me. I saw Billiard Ball in the mirror too. He was rising too, clawing his way up the vomit-colored bedspread as he got his feet on the floor beneath him. His eye streaming, his teeth gritted in fury, he hoisted his torso onto the bed.
The room was so small we were barely a foot apart. No way I could get past him to the door. I needed a weapon—now. The lamp on the dresser. It was all there was. I grabbed hold of it. It was heavy. The wire ran over the side of the dresser and was plugged into the wall behind. I looked over my shoulder at Billiard Ball. He looked at me. His one good eye was aflame with rage. His jacket had fallen open to expose the holster under his arm.
Oh God, he had a gun! Of course he did.
I lifted the lamp—no more than a few inches. The cord held it in place after that. I yanked the lamp as hard as I could. It didn’t come free. I yanked it again.
Billiard Ball reached into his jacket for his gun.
There was a pounding knock at the door. It startled us both into a moment of inaction. We both looked at the door. An old woman’s voice came through it. It was the woman at the front desk: the bent, nearly humpbacked old woman who had checked me into the motel.
“What’s going on in there? Stop it, whatever it is! I called the police! They’re on the way!”
She pounded on the door again. Bang, bang, bang.
My face twisted in strain, I yanked the lamp with all my might. The cord broke, snapped away from the plug, spitting orange sparks.
Billiard Ball worked himself up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. He drew his gun out of the holster.
Bang, bang, bang at the door. “The police are coming!” screamed the motel lady.
Billiard Ball aimed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. I swung the base of the lamp at him as hard as I could. It smacked him in the side of the head, full force. The gun went off. The noise in that small room was like the end of the world, only louder. I thought I felt the bullet whistle by my ear. The mirror shattered behind me. Billiard Ball wobbled where he sat, stunned by the blow from the lamp.
When the deafening gun blast subsided, everything seemed muffled and far away, weirdly quiet and dreamlike. Was the old lady still pounding on the door? I didn’t know; I couldn’t hear. Was Billiard Ball making some sort of noise through his contorted features? Maybe; I wasn’t sure.
