Excerpt of Nightmares in Glass (Hourglass #4)

Hi readers. If you’re here, I can only assume you’re a fan of my humble work and want to know what’s in store for Clyde, Kev and the team, and just what the hell is a nightmare in glass. Well, no dice! You’ll have to wait for the book. Or maybe you’re lost and confused, because no, I’m not the footballer Daniel James; I can’t kick a ball, but I can write a weird, “genre-bending” adventure.

The book won’t be out until sometime in 2026, and unfortunately I don’t yet have a cover prepared to tease you’re eyeballs. Just know that I wrote the book whilst vibing heavily on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Dokken!), Dennis Quaid’s bananas 1984 fever dream thriller Dreamscape, and somehow mixed in a Wild West-style insectoid rebellion…I assure you it makes sense.

If you’re not up to speed on the previous books, be warned, the following opening chapter will be spoilery for the finale of Hair-Trigger Smile.

1

Clyde hung up the phone. He stared at it, lying there on the kitchen counter like it might bite him, his whole world gone quiet like there had been a sudden change in air pressure.

“It’s escaped.” That’s what Spector had said before ending the call. “The Coma Weaver has escaped, and it’s feeding. Dremel knows what we did.”

Five minutes ago, Clyde had awoken with a profound sense of dread, and even the comfort and warmth of Nat lying beside him in bed did little to ease his tension. He had felt unbearably alone. Vulnerable. The type of vulnerability that can only come over a person in the early hours. In his sleepless exile, he’d heard a captivating melody, at once both soothing and ominous, the notes ethereal and glassy, like tones produced from a glass harp. He wasn’t sure how long the melody had held him, seconds at most, but he had been confused as to its source. They were like echoes from his muddled dream, trailing after him into the real world. The next thing he’d heard was his phone vibrating. Not his primary phone, but the cheap burner. The one he and Spector had used to discuss matters that would not only land them in an Hourglass black site but might have now potentially unleashed a living nightmare upon all sentient worlds.

Leaving Nat asleep in his room—their room now, he realized—he took his cup of coffee from the breakfast nook and paced across his dark apartment, dimly lit from the ambient streetlights outside the large windows. It was an elegant open plan: spacious, exposed brick walls, and despite the fact that it was his home, he still kept most of his belongings—art supplies, stacks of fat-packed comic-book boxes and memorabilia—in his bedroom. He stood next to his drawing board positioned by the bay windows overlooking Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. Sipping his coffee, he brooded over the view, feeling like everything was about to unravel very quickly. Somewhere out there a police siren was crying out. Two sirens, maybe more. A police helicopter, shrunk by distance, was pursuing somebody. Looked like it was a wild night for the NYPD.

Clyde was about to raise his cup to his lips again when he noticed his reflection wasn’t moving, a frozen image, staring back at him. A nasty little smirk crossed its lips, the eyes cold, calculating; was that a large scar running down the left side of his face? Confusion and bad-sleep brain fog stalled Clyde for a few seconds. He slowly brought his fingers to his left cheek, probing flesh he knew to be unscarred. The reflection remained still, watching him, then nodded once, causing Clyde’s skin to chill with goosebumps. His reflection vanished into nothingness.

Clyde didn’t like that one bit. What was happening?

If Dremel knew what they’d done, then the rest of the House of the Glowing Reel would know too. How long before Director Trujillo learned of this, or Clyde’s direct boss at the agency, Deputy Director Meadows?

Not long at all.

Clyde’s apartment door burst open. He spun around in shock, coffee sloshing the floor. The invaders’ entry was loud enough to wake the neighbors, but the only neighbor who had once mattered, and who could have helped him right now, was no longer on this side of the mortal plane: Kev, his best friend, was who-knows-where over in the dead wastes of the Null.

With a breath of relief Clyde saw it wasn’t hostiles kicking his door in, but the authoritative weight of an Hourglass retrieval team: all sophisticated tactical body armor and top-of-the-line weaponry, but it was a basic blunt and effective boot that took his door off its hinges. The seven-man squad fanned out, taking command of the room in typical shock-and-awe fashion.

‘It sounds like you guys got here just in time,’ Clyde said, trying not to sound too pissed off about his door, and more concerned about that business with his reflection. ‘Outside, is that an “us” problem?’ He forced himself to check his reflection in the window again. Just him, staring back, a perfect mimic.

‘This is a “you” problem,’ Rose said. She was young and petite, but jacked like a pro power lifter or CrossFit athlete, her already impressive musculature powered way beyond human limits by the spectral death-rage of her former US Army unit; for her, kicking Clyde’s door in would have been like a mule kicking through damp drywall, and Clyde couldn’t help but flash back on the memory of their first encounter: her knocking politely on the front door of his and Kev’s old apartment, paying them a visit to extend an offer of enlightenment and possible active service at the behest of Hourglass.

This was different. Aggressive. They were not Clyde’s colleagues now.

Clyde sagged into the chair at the small desk near his drawing board.

Clearly this visit wasn’t going to be settled with polite discourse over a cup of coffee. Rose wasn’t outfitted in full tactical gear like the rest of the agents, just dark cargo pants and a dark windbreaker. She powered over to where Clyde was sitting by the window. Her platinum-dyed braids shone like liquid silver under the ambient streetlights of Brooklyn.

He knew not to fight. Even if it had been an enemy of Hourglass bursting in to murder him, Clyde knew his being a member of the agency’s local strike team was currently mooted in Kev’s absence; together they had been a lethal and efficient duo, but without Kev, Clyde couldn’t borrow any of his friend’s spectral telekinesis; Clyde’s other, more recent abilities were still too shaky and unreliable to depend on. He had a small arsenal stashed about his apartment for such potential home invasions, of course, but the fact that these are—or were—his brothers and sisters-in-arms made the prospect of hurting them much harder, especially Rose. He couldn’t bear the thought of it. They had been friends to begin with, but things…they had gotten complicated.

Besides, he was in enough trouble right now to not even consider drawing a gun on Rose and the rest of these jackboots.

Rose loomed over him. The shadows were unable to hide the disappointment on her tough, tomboyish face. ‘You really stepped in it now.’

With minimal head movement, Clyde calmly assessed the positions of the other agents scattered throughout his open-plan apartment; unable to see their faces, he had no way of knowing whether he knew any of them from the Madhouse, New York’s head office. But he couldn’t help but notice that none of the agents were a big, blocky dude in a hockey jersey and old-school hockey goalie mask, and that meant Ace wasn’t part of this retrieval team; he must still be finishing up his Canadian retreat. Clyde wasn’t sure if that made this situation better or worse. He noticed how one of the agents had stationed themselves—perhaps out of respect—outside the doorway of his bedroom, not rushing in to rouse Nat out of bed. There was a good chance Nat hadn’t even rolled over from all the commotion of the broken door. She’d had a few beers last night and tended to sleep heavily. Add the fact that she was only in a T-shirt and panties, and the bedroom agent would be in for a memorable time if they weren’t careful.

‘How bad is it?’ Clyde asked. There was no point in playing dumb. He didn’t know the ins and outs of the intelligence-gathering and sharing of Director Trujillo, but since he was far from pure human and operated in circles connected to the very machinery of life and death, he would know about Clyde’s fuck-up.

‘So, you’ve already heard?’ Rose asked, jutting her chin to the phone near Clyde’s hand. ‘Spector?’

‘How bad is it?’ Clyde repeated, thinking about his independent reflection, scarred and full of unsettling confidence.

‘Bad enough that I have to haul you in to see Meadows at three in the morning.’ She shot a glance over to Clyde’s bedroom, where one of her agents continued to wait. ‘Is Nat here?’ Concern etched itself across Rose’s brow.

Rose was dangerous, incredibly so. Clyde thought of her as a ghost-juiced Captain America with a prettier face and a penchant for casual profanity. But he also knew she was tactically smart enough not to stack her chances against Nat.

‘Nat’s here,’ Nat said, walking out of the room, her palm heel rubbing one bleary eye. Her long black hair, streaked with purple highlights, hung over her left shoulder; the right side of her head was shaved to a fuzzy dark bristle. The door guard took a tentative step back from the potentially major threat of the young and lithe Filipina, extensively tattooed and in a worn-in New Bomb Turks T-shirt. Her deep-brown eyes emitted a brief flicker of violet light, making the agent appear unsure of the real authority in this situation.

‘You sleep okay?’ Rose asked, the question sounding suspicious rather than friendly, perhaps even solicitous.

‘What?’ Nat looked at her funny. ‘Did you go full illegal alien patrol just to ask how I slept? The fuck you all doing?’

‘Never mind. Let’s do this the easy way,’ Rose said to her, then focused back on Clyde. ‘Meadows doesn’t want any harm to come to you.’

‘And you do?’ Clyde asked, taken aback by her tone.

‘Of course not,’ Rose responded, but it took her a moment to do so. ‘You brought this on yourself. You were warned about interfering in Median affairs. You didn’t listen. And now you’ve kickstarted a rolling clusterfuck.’

Clyde’s eyes met Nat’s from across the dark apartment, but her posture was just as uncertain as his.

‘You still haven’t said how bad of a clusterfuck this is,’ he said. Part of him didn’t want to know, was too scared to know. The Coma Weaver, the Babylonian dream parasite congenitally hooked to his soul, had woken from its prison thanks to his and Spector’s recent actions: operating illegally in the Median, the dream world, in an effort to save the soul of David Bentley, a very powerful Spark—individuals whose bloodlines carry the potent energies of an extinct cosmic race—from one of the nine monarchs of the dead. Clyde and Spector had succeeded in saving the soul of Bentley, but not without consequence, disturbing the slumber of the Coma Weaver. Honestly, Clyde was amazed Dremel, the de facto ruler of the Median’s House of the Glowing Reel, hadn’t killed him on principle already, severing his soul thread and banishing him to the Null; he must have his reasons.

‘Multiple reports of people all over the world slipping into comas. It took a while for our intel network to collate the data with our international partners, but they’ve confirmed that the cases are connected. You threw a bucket of cold water into the face of that fucker that’s clinging to your soul, and now a lot of innocent people are paying the price for it. What’s worse, these comas they’re in are showing signs of other inexplicable phenomena. Calling a spade a spade, their fucking nightmares seem to be manifesting on the wrong side of the pillow. The powers-that-be aren’t sure how long they can contain this. Nice work, Clyde.’ Rose pulled out a set of handcuffs from her black windbreaker, sliding them across the table to Clyde. ‘You’ve done enough damage already, please keep this peaceful.’

‘Where’s Ace?’ Clyde asked. Outside, somewhere in the city, sirens continued to wail like lost, frightened souls.

‘You could have called. No need to kick the fucking door in.’ Nat moved carefully, trying not to spook any of the jumpy agents, but the heat in her voice was unmistakable. ‘We’re still teammates, right? And I know Uncle Meadows wouldn’t have ordered that.’

‘Deputy Director Meadows told me to bring you in. And not before time. We were already en route when that shit started happening.’ Rose held up a finger as if requesting silence, her ear cocked and listening to the continuous wailing of the distant police and ambulance sirens bouncing around the avenues and buildings. ‘That makes me give exactly zero fucks about your fucking door. Now move, or we stop being gentle.’

Clyde could see how serious Rose was. She meant it, and the way her diamond-hard gaze kept cutting to Nat’s position in the room was troubling. Whilst no longer as physically strong as she used to be, Rose was still way beyond human capabilities, capable of breaking him into little pieces if she had to. However, even at her former peak, Clyde knew Rose was too smart to believe she could handle Nat, who was also a Spark like David Bentley, and like Ace. But seeing that hard glint in her eyes meant she was still flirting with that fatalist streak she’d been harboring since Barros had abandoned her a few weeks ago. Private Savannah Barros was one of Rose’s old Army buddies who got KIA in a bomb blast aiding the Syrian Democratic Forces during a peacekeeping operation, along with Sergeant Richard “Sarge” Connors, the leader of Rose’s old military unit, and Private Lewis Darcy. But despite their physical deaths, Rose, to her initial shock, managed to hold onto them, somehow funneling the collective rage and grief at their points of death and utilizing it to supplement her strength to uncanny, car-flipping levels. Additionally, Barros, Sarge, and Darcy had formed what was affectionately known as the Intensive Scare Unit, a three-person spectral combat and recon unit. But Barros had abandoned Rose during the David Bentley assignment, impulsively taking off with Clyde’s best friend, Kev, to the Null in search of greater glory and salvation: the Firmament Needle, a lost relic, said to possess the power to create a new heaven in the Null’s stead. But the pursuit of this divine item was a whole other political headache, a quest that could potentially destroy everything.

Clyde carefully stood up, forgoing the Sig Sauer taped beneath the table. A part of him was still scared to catch his reflection in the window again. He ignored the cuffs and levelled a stare at Rose. ‘What’s going on out there?’ he asked, his stomach knotting itself with tension. Something told him it was related to this visit. And to the Coma Weaver. He saw the first flashes of red and blue painting the buildings outside, racing past down the block. It sounded worse than he realized.

‘Probably something weird,’ Rose answered. ‘Aldey?’

Aldway, the agent guarding the threshold to the apartment, checked his phone and got busy tapping the glowing screen. He shook his head in exasperation, the screen light reflecting off his protective goggles. ‘Cops still have the area surrounded, but from what I’m seeing here they’re going to be about as useful as tap shoes to a quadriplegic.’

One of the agents standing poised in the middle of the apartment suddenly seemed to suffer some inner-ear imbalance, collapsing to his hands and knees, vanishing from view behind the couch. It might have been comical under other circumstances, but Clyde found himself thinking of the glass-harp music from his dream for some reason and wondered if the agent had heard something similar.

‘What the fuck, Hopkins?’ Rose eye-checked the rest of her back-up team as if expecting to find similar gravitational difficulties. None so far.

‘He been drinking?’ Nat asked, giving Hopkins a sardonic appraisal.

‘Felt like I was falling,’ Hopkins said, the embarrassed agent holding one hand out towards the back of the couch for balance as if to brace for another topple. ‘Like waking from a nightmare.’

‘You best not be napping on me,’ Rose rebuked, walking nose up to the big windows to check on the street below.

‘Might be low blood sugar,’ Hopkins said, his words ringing hollow.

Clyde slid the cuffs back across the table, watching Rose’s profile as she scanned the street below. ‘Whatever’s happening out there—’ he fired a quick glance at Hopkins, who still seemed a little wobbly-kneed, ‘in here, I can be of more use with my hands free. I’m not going to run, Rose. We’ll go see Meadows, but I’m not making myself an easy target.’

‘You got that right,’ Nat added. The agent near her, an Army vet who had served his country with two tours and seen combat before being drafted into Hourglass, seemed timorous about training his rifle on the lithe and unarmed young woman dressed in nothing more than a band T-shirt, panties, and a pair of socks.

Rose gave Nat a cautious glance, then sized Clyde up for a full five count. Clyde started to expect things would have to, regrettably, get violent when Rose snatched the cuffs back up from the table and trudged away from the window.

‘HQ picked up an emergency call to the 94th Precinct from one of their squad cars. A uniform, Officer Winslow, reported his partner, Nolan, fainting in the car, becoming unresponsive. On the way to the emergency room Nolan, still asleep, started freaking out, grabbed the wheel, and crashed the squad car into traffic lights along North Eleventh Street. Winslow then radioed into dispatch again requesting back-up, talking about Nolan sleepwalking and talking, babbling about not knowing where he was, how he didn’t recognize his own partner. That’s when he pulled his gun and started waving it around, shot Winslow dead. From what we’ve seen on the local traffic cam, Nolan tried to run away, except he couldn’t. He was running in place, in slow motion.’ Rose looked to Aldway. ‘Status update?’

‘He’s still doing his slow-mo hamster-wheel thing. Like a video game glitch. Eye in the sky shows four more squad cars and an ambulance are now on the scene of Eleventh and Bedford Avenue.’ Aldway’s goggles remained fixed on his phone screen. ‘Shit… You won’t believe this.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

‘They’re trying to get close to Nolan…it’s like the whole road has turned into one big conveyor belt. They’re all just moving in place too.’ Aldway glanced up at his fellow agents. ‘And looking suitably confused. What. The. Fuck.’

‘That’s going to raise a few questions with your local councilman,’ Nat said.

Clyde thought he heard a distant whining sound but couldn’t quite place it. Coming from a neighbor’s apartment? A sort of mechanical buzzing. It was getting closer. Aldway, leaning out into the softly lit hallway, must have heard it too. The agent froze, startled, stress-muttering something under his breath as he raised his assault rifle at something in the hallway. He didn’t even have time to get a shot off. Clyde saw it all. One second Aldway was partway through issuing a warning, and the next, a blurry man in doctor’s scrubs, surgical mask, and a buzzing dentist drill was framed by the doorway, effortlessly knocking Aldway’s rifle aside and overpowering him against the doorjamb. The dentist’s movements were choppy, reminding Clyde of some amateurish flipbook animation.

No one had a clear shot at the dentist with Aldway’s pained thrashings obscuring the target. Aldway’s screams became drowned-out gurgles as his mouth filled with blood, the drill boring down into several teeth at random. Then, as quickly as it began, the dentist backed away, but before Rose or any of the other agents could get a lock on him, he marched off, straight through the wall like a ghost, except Clyde knew he wasn’t a ghost. This was something else. Something worse. Something he’d unleashed.

Aldway sagged into the doorframe as all of his 32 teeth vomited into his cupped palms like little corn kernels on a torrent of red syrup.

‘That’s no P.L.E.,’ said one of the other agents, as if that justified his next action: squeezing out several suppressed bursts of high-caliber firepower into the wall the dentist disappeared through—the wall of Kev’s former apartment, now empty.

Every agent present knew full well the dentist wasn’t a Post-Life Entity—official agency-speak for ghosts—but Clyde had to admit he would have tried shooting it too.

‘Hold your fire, shit-for-brains,’ Rose hollered. Two ghastly apparitions appeared on either side of her, these ones actual P.L.E.s: Sarge and Darcy.

Sarge’s hard, square-jawed face was littered with shrapnel, but compared to Darcy, the big husky Nebraska brute who had a gaping chest wound and whose guts hung out like a badly stuffed sack of snakes, he was a real looker. The eerily glowing pair raced off after the dentist for a quick scout of the area.

One of the other agents was offering what little medical assistance they could to the gagging and spluttering Aldway, pulling a zip-lock bag for his teeth from one of his pouches and trying to shore up his gums with gauze.

‘Nat, put some pants on,’ Rose said, without taking her eyes off Clyde. ‘We don’t know if we can kill these nightmares, or whatever the fuck they are. But I’m trusting you with a gun. If you fuck me on this, you better make sure you kill me. Otherwise, I’ll never stop hunting you. And without Kev here to help you, your combat enhancements are gone, and you’re back to being just another agent with a gun.’ She stepped aside, waiting for Clyde to pass her.

Clyde was a peaceable comic-book geek before Hourglass. Wanted to be a comic-book artist, in fact, desperately so. Rose and Ace had trained him incredibly well in a very short space of time—a period just shy of basic military boot camp—and he became a proven natural soldier, but more than that, Kev’s telekinetic abilities had provided Clyde with a significant edge over many of the enemies he had conquered. Sure, he now had first-rate on-the-job experience with threats he didn’t enjoy thinking about too much, but with Kev gone, he knew he would be no match for Rose’s greater experience. And yet, he held her gaze, still pissed at her attitude, at breaking his door down like he was now nothing more than an enemy in waiting. He slid the Sig Sauer out from under the table and stood up.

Nat returned from the bedroom in her studded leather jacket and high-tops, buttoning her jeans up and chewing a piece of gum. She flashed an expression of unbridled challenge at Rose. ‘“Just another agent with a gun.” You sure about that?’

Clyde wasn’t sure whether that was Nat being protective of him or hinting that his recently manifested, Weaver-born power was nothing to be overlooked. Clyde loved her for having his back but knew that his poorly understood talent for creating soul fire, as he now thought of it, was best left alone, considering the damage it had already caused. He watched Nat slip one earbud in. The music fueling her audiokinetic Spark talent.

Sarge and Darcy returned to the apartment, looking frustrated.

‘No sign of him,’ Sarge said. ‘Like he never existed.’

Clyde walked over to where Aldway was now gushing gobs of blood into the kitchen sink. ‘You didn’t take a micro-nap before the attack, did you?’

Aldway started to mumble something unintelligible, gave up, and settled for a definitive head shake.

‘Then it’s not you who’s scared of dentists.’

‘He probably is now,’ Nat said.

Aldway pointed at Nat, nodding enthusiastically.

‘It could be a sleeping neighbor’s nightmare,’ Clyde said. ‘Slipped its leash. Any idea if these things can be fought physically?’

Rose fired off clipped commands to her team of agents, getting them moving. Sarge and Darcy took point, leading the way into the hall towards the building’s stairwell.

‘From what I’ve been told, inconclusive.’ She gestured for Clyde and Nat to move on ahead of her, clearly not trusting that they wouldn’t try to cut and run behind her back. ‘That’s why Meadows wants you at the office slumber party. He needs you to bed down and clean this mess up from the inside.’

END OF CHAPTER

So, there it is. I hope that whetted your appetite for the madness which follows.

Thank you, and happy reading!

Dan