Nightmare Academy Read online

  NIGHTMARE ACADEMY

  by DEAN LOREY

  Illustrations by BRANDON DORMAN

  For my wife, Elizabeth,

  and our sons, Chris and Alex.

  I love you guys.

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE NIGHTMARE DIVISION

  1. Monster in the Model

  2. A Class-5 Silvertongue in Full Voice

  3. The Smell of Cinnamon

  4. Into the Nether

  5. The High Council

  6. Barakkas the Rager

  PART II: THE NIGHTMARE ACADEMY

  7. The Boats in the Branches

  8. The Trout of Truth

  9. The Meaning of POGD

  10. The Transforming Snark

  11. A Terrible Houseparty

  12. The Hags of the Void

  13. The Shadow Knows

  14. Verminion the Deceiver

  PART III: THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

  15. Assault on the Nightmare Division

  16. The Bracer of Barakkas

  17. Truth and Consequences

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  THE NIGHTMARE DIVISION

  CHAPTER ONE

  MONSTER IN THE MODEL 3

  On most days, Charlie Benjamin was pretty sure he was the loneliest kid on planet Earth. He went to school by himself in his home on a quiet street inside a gated community. Although the houses all looked nearly alike on the outside, there were several different models a buyer could choose from.

  The Benjamins lived in a model 3.

  “The model 3 is the superior model,” Charlie’s father frequently told him. He was an exact man with the exacting name of Barrington. “The 1’s are obviously prototypes—less said about the 1’s, the better. The 2’s, however, are what happens when you rework something too quickly. You often take two steps backward to take one step forward. Which brings us to the 3’s—the simple, solid, dependable 3’s.”

  The model 3 was Charlie Benjamin’s prison.

  At thirteen, he was short for his age, with unruly sandy-colored hair, dark brown eyes, and a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks. His elbows and knees were remarkably unscabbed and he had virtually no bruises, thanks to his well-meaning mother’s insistence that he stay inside the house.

  “It’s an uncertain world,” she often told him. “I can protect you in here, but once you step outside…” This was always followed by a grave shake of the head, as if the horrors of life outside of the model 3 were too painful to contemplate.

  “I know you keep saying that,” Charlie said to her one Saturday morning after a particularly grave shake of the head. “But that doesn’t make it true. I’m tired of being stuck here all the time. I want to go to regular school.”

  “Regular school?” his mother replied. “Honey, we have everything a regular school has right here. Books and computers, papers and pencils, tests and grades…”

  “But no students,” Charlie interrupted. “I mean, other than me.”

  “That’s true,” his mother agreed pleasantly. She was such a pleasant woman, in fact, that she’d never even blamed her own mother for naming her Olga. “And thank goodness, because no students means no teasing, no bullying, no making fun of you just because you’re a little bit different.”

  Even though Charlie was the first to admit that he was more than a little bit different, protecting him from the abuse of other kids by locking him away in the house seemed a little to him like removing a splinter in his finger by chopping off his hand—it got the job done, but at what cost?

  The price is just too high, he thought as he heard the mailman shove the morning mail through a chute in the front door. With a sigh, he walked over to retrieve the usual assortment of bills and catalogs—always for his parents, never for him. And that was when, to his astonishment, he spotted a small blue envelope addressed to “Charlie Benjamin.”

  “That’s me,” he gasped.

  Almost in a daze, Charlie opened the envelope, to reveal an invitation to a party—and not just any party. It was a sleepover party at the home of some kids who lived just down the street. Charlie didn’t know them personally, of course—he didn’t know any kids his own age—but clearly someone there had taken pity on the small, strange boy who lived in the model 3.

  Charlie read the invitation twice to make sure it really said what he thought it said; then he read it once more for good measure. Once he was satisfied that he wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, he showed it to his parents.

  “Absolutely not,” his father said after glancing at the invitation.

  “But why?” Charlie shot back. “I’ve been good. I’ve done all my schoolwork—in fact, I just finished the chapter on geography.”

  “Honey, what your father means,” his mother said, “is that we certainly wish you could go, but what if you have one of your ‘nightmares’?”

  One of his nightmares.

  Even though it had been years since Charlie had had a catastrophic nightmare in public, the thought of it happening again made him absolutely weak with dread. And yet—here was an actual, real opportunity to make a friend.

  He couldn’t pass it up.

  So he begged his parents. He pleaded. He offered to do the dishes for a year and mow the lawn and learn French. He argued that it had been so long since his last unspeakable nightmare that he had surely outgrown them. Finally, he told his parents that going to the sleepover party was the only present he wanted for Christmas and his birthday combined.

  For the next two years.

  Three, if that’s what it took.

  After much arguing behind closed doors, his parents finally relented. Which is how, later that night, Charlie found himself skipping up the steps of a stranger’s house with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder.

  “You know how to get ahold of us if utter disaster occurs?” Charlie’s mother asked nervously, following behind him.

  “Yes, mom, I know how to use a phone.”

  “Do you want me to quickly review any of the fu’s I’ve taught you—kung or otherwise?” his father offered.

  “I’m not gonna need to fight anyone with kung fu, dad. Nothing’s gonna happen, trust me.”

  “We never should have permitted this,” his mother moaned. “And a sleepover no less! What were we thinking?”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” Charlie said, looking longingly at the other boys inside the house. They were clearly already having a blast. “I won’t have any nightmares tonight—trust me.”

  “Of course we do, son,” Mr. Benjamin replied as he handed Charlie a cell phone. “We know nothing will go wrong, but just in case it does, I put our home number on speed dial so you can call quickly if something absolutely catastrophic occurs.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Charlie said resignedly, taking the phone from him.

  “And if you look in your backpack,” his mother added, “you’ll find earplugs in a little Baggie. You can use them if the other children tease you and call you horrible names.”

  “Okay, Mom,” Charlie said, wishing desperately that they would leave—but they just stood there.

  “Well!” Mr. Benjamin said finally. “I guess we had better go. We love you, son, and we trust you and we feel certain in our hearts and in our souls that nothing cataclysmic or disastrous will happen this evening.”

  “It won’t,” Charlie said. “Everything will be fine. I promise.”

  And everything was fine…for a while. Charlie played computer games, ate pizza, and watched PG-13 horror movies. Incredibly, he even found himself on the verge of making a friend—a tall blond kid everyone called “F.T.,” which, Cha
rlie learned, was short for “F.T.W.,” which was short for “For the Win,” because of his terrific video-game prowess.

  It was the most fun Charlie had ever had in his entire life.

  Then it came time to go to sleep.

  Accounts differed as to what exactly happened during what newspaper headlines would soon call “Terror at the Sleepover Apocalypse,” but certain facts were not in dispute. At some point, around three in the morning, tremendous screaming and crashing came from the bedroom where the kids were sleeping. When the adults in the house finally managed to fling open the door, they found all of the children suspended from the ceiling, wrapped tightly in cocoons of extraordinarily tough webbing. The only child not encased and suspended from the ceiling was Charlie, who stared at the shattered bedroom window in shock.

  “My God, what happened?” gasped the father when he saw his children dangling like Christmas tree ornaments.

  “A giant spider,” Charlie said, and pointed to the broken window. “It left through there. It’s not my fault.”

  No one blamed Charlie, exactly. After all, how could a thirteen-year-old kid have done such an extraordinary thing to so many other children? And yet, even the local newspaper reporter wondered why Charlie was the only one left unharmed by the “giant spider”—a fact that Charlie himself had puzzled over. Even though no one actually accused him of anything, after the kids were cut down and revived, none of them would speak to him or even look at him—not even F.T. Charlie had gone to sleep that night thinking he’d finally made a friend, but he’d woken up to find himself the object of fear and panic.

  It wasn’t the first time.

  In fact, from almost the moment he was born, sleep and Charlie Benjamin were an explosive combination. The very first public disaster had happened during naptime at Welcoming Arms preschool.

  Charlie was three years old.

  Even though he couldn’t quite recall the specifics of the nightmare he’d had while he and the rest of the children slept on mats inside the darkened classroom, he could vividly remember the inhuman howling and shrieking that had snapped him out of it. As the preschool teachers raced in to see what could possibly be making such astonishing noise, little Charlie woke, to find the classroom around him utterly destroyed.

  The colorful nursery-rhyme wallpaper hung from the wall in ribbons, as if slashed by talons. The fish tank lay shattered against an overturned bookshelf as the fish inside frantically flipped and gasped for air. A spray of glass from the back window glittered brilliantly across an easel, which lay splintered on the floor.

  “What happened?” the teacher asked, her face ashen.

  “I’m sorry,” little Charlie replied, shaking. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “You did all this?” the teacher asked incredulously.

  Charlie nodded. “Sometimes bad things happen when I have nightmares.”

  The pattern was always the same.

  He would go to sleep at home in his soft, warm bed and everything would seem to be fine—at least for a while. But sometime during the night, terrible snorts and growls would rip through the house. By the time his parents burst into his bedroom to see what was wrong, the place would be ruined—mattress stuffing tossed everywhere, carpet torn, glass shattered. And even though they never actually caught him in the process of destroying a room while in the grip of a bad dream, they figured he must be doing it—it was the only explanation that made any sense. In fact, Charlie dreaded going to sleep because he was terrified about what he might find when he woke up.

  The incident at naptime (later dubbed the “Naptime Catastrophe”) quickly became legend, and it wasn’t long before the other kids starting chanting “Nightmare Charlie” at him whenever he walked by. Soon his parents were summoned before the preschool administrator, who carefully explained that Welcoming Arms would no longer be welcoming Charlie.

  “The other children are afraid of him, you see,” the administrator said with terrible seriousness. “In fact, they refuse to take their naps when he’s in the room. This is absolutely unacceptable. Naptime is the cornerstone of the preschool experience. It is the glue that holds the remainder of the curriculum together. Without naptime, chaos is inevitable and ruin is sure to follow!”

  “I can sense your passion,” Charlie’s father agreed in his calmest voice. “But if you think that Charlie is the cause of their distress—”

  “He’s not,” Charlie’s mother snapped as she gently rubbed her son’s back with her warm, strong hands. “The other children have been teasing and tormenting him—not the other way around. My heavens, do you know what they call him? ‘Nightmare Charlie!’”

  “Quite right,” Barrington continued. “But my point is that perhaps Charlie could be moved to a different area of the classroom while the rest of the children are sleeping.”

  The administrator was horrified. “We cannot go down that slippery slope. If I make one exception for one boy, pretty soon I’ll be making two exceptions for two boys, and, before you know it, it’s all exceptions and no ‘ceptions’ if you get my drift.” He shook his head sadly. “No, Welcoming Arms and ‘Nightmare Charlie’—I mean, Charlie—must now go their separate ways.”

  Even though Welcoming Arms was the very first preschool to kick Charlie out, it certainly wasn’t the last—Balance Point, Happy Child, Li’l Learners, and Perfect PlayPals followed soon after. But that’s where Charlie’s horrible streak of getting kicked out of preschools finally came to an end, because, by then, he was old enough to get kicked out of kindergarten.

  Charlie was six years old.

  “I know you claim there’s nothing wrong with him,” the principal of Paul Revere Elementary purred to Charlie’s parents, slurring through adult braces. They were a rat’s nest of decaying food—an archaeological dig that contained everything he had eaten in the previous week. “But our school psychologist believes he suffers from a variety of serious problems. Very serious. In fact, he has diagnosed Charlie with—let me see…” Mr. Krup began reading from a file. “Yes, here it is. OCADMMD.”

  “That’s an awful lot of letters for such a little boy,” Mr. Benjamin said, protectively putting his arm around Charlie’s narrow shoulders.

  “And he’s earned every one of them, believe me! It stands for Obsessive-Compulsive Attention Deficit Mental Meltdown Disorder.” Mr. Krup set the file down and glared at Charlie, unearthing an ancient piece of corn that lay trapped against a molar. “Now, being a public school, we are required by law to give him an education. However, we think it is in ‘Nightmare Charlie’s’—I mean, Charlie’s—best interests to be removed from the general population and sequestered in a trailer off school grounds, where he can only associate with other children who have been diagnosed with as many letters as he has. Sign here, please.”

  The principal slid a form over to Charlie’s parents.

  Charlie’s mother slid it back.

  “No,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You and the other children may not like Charlie, Mr. Krup. You may not understand him. But he is a wonder. And if you can’t see that, then you don’t deserve him. He will leave with us today and never return.” Olga stood and smiled triumphantly. “Until I can find a school that sticks, I will teach him myself.”

  And that’s just what she did.

  For the next seven years, Charlie went to school in the protective bubble of the model 3—until that bubble burst on the night of the Sleepover Apocalypse.

  Why am I such a freak? Charlie thought as he sat on his couch and stared out of the large front window of their home, hoping to catch a glimpse of the neighborhood kids as they got out of school. Even if he couldn’t play with them, he figured he could at least watch them. It had been five days since the Sleepover Apocalypse, and he was still reeling.

  At the end of the block, the school bus from General MacArthur Middle School groaned to a shuddery halt. Its door accordioned open and students poured out, chomping gum, hauling bulging back
packs, laughing and playfully shoving one another. Charlie quickly spotted F.T., who removed a Frisbee from his book bag and whipped it toward one of the other kids.

  Charlie waved to him. F.T. saw him in the window and shot him an icy glare; then he turned back to the other kids, ignoring Charlie completely.

  “Do you think they’ll ever stop blaming me?” Charlie asked his mother. “About them hanging from the ceiling in cocoons, I mean.”

  He knew the answer was no, but, to his amazement, his mother simply shrugged, barely looking up from the afternoon soap on the TV. She had changed so much in the last day or so that he hardly even recognized her. She seemed to be completely uninterested in him, which wasn’t like her at all. Charlie hoped that she was simply coming down with the flu, because he couldn’t bear the thought that his recent disaster might have caused her to finally, after believing in him for all these years, just give up.

  “I want to go to school next year. Normal school,” Charlie said to his parents during dinner that night.

  “Charlie, we’ve gone over this and over this,” Barrington replied. “Do I have to remind you about the Sleepover Apocalypse?”

  “But that wasn’t my fault!” Charlie shouted. “Everyone keeps blaming me, but I told you I didn’t do anything to those kids—it was a giant spider! I actually saw it this time!”

  “Charlie, please,” Mr. Benjamin said, massaging his temples. “This conversation’s over.”

  “It is not over! I can’t have any of my nightmares at school because it’s during the day, so why shouldn’t I be able to go like everyone else?”

  “Because they’ll hurt you!” Mr. Benjamin shot back. Instantly, he looked as though he regretted it. “You may not have one of your nightmares, but it won’t matter. They’ve already labeled you, Charlie. You’re different…and they’ll torture you for it. They always do. Now, please, go get ready for bed, son.”