It begins in an old tenement with a horrifying crime. It continues after midnight, when ayoung boy, held cap-tive in a basement, is filled with unearthly visions of fantastic and frightening worlds. How could his kidnap-pers know that the ransom would be their own souls?For as the hours pass, the boy's nightmares invade his captors like parasites--and soon, they become real.

Thirteen nightmares unfold: A young man searches for his dead wife among the crumbling buildings of Manhattan... a journalist seeks the ultimate evil in a plague-ridden outpost of India... ancient rituals begin anew with the mystery of a teenage girl's disappear-ance.., and in a hospital for the criminally insane,there is only one doorway to salvation But the night is not yet over, and the real nightmare has just begun.Thirteen chilling tales of terror from one of the masters of the horror story.