House of Reckoning

by John Saul

  She shut the words out, quickened her pace as much as she could, but just before she set her tray down one of the girls plopped a book bag onto the vacant chair. “This seat’s taken,” she said.

  Sarah stopped abruptly, staggered, almost lost her balance, and lurched against Tiffany rather than risk letting go of the tray to grab the chair for stability. “Sorry,” she said.

  Tiffany glared at her but said nothing.

  Now two tables full of kids were staring at her. The noise level in the cafeteria dropped as conversations died away and everyone watched her limp around looking for a place to sit.

  Way in the back, a boy sitting alone watched her, too. There were plenty of empty seats at his table, but as soon as she made eye contact with him, he averted his eyes and looked down.

  Sarah got it—he didn’t want her to sit with him, either. Yet the way he ducked his head seemed familiar, as if she’d seen him somewhere before.

  Then, in the far corner of the cafeteria, she spotted four students sitting at one end of a long—and otherwise empty—table. Her face burning as everyone watched, she hobbled through the maze of tables and chairs, almost tripping over a book bag someone shoved in front of her as she passed. Finally she set her tray at the opposite end from where the other kids were sitting and let her backpack slip off her shoulder onto the floor.

  The other kids at the table instantly rose to their feet, picked up their trays, and walked away.

  Sarah glanced around and saw that everyone in the cafeteria had seen what happened.

  She sat down but couldn’t make her trembling fingers open the milk carton.

  Then, after what seemed an eternity, the hum of conversation began to rise again as people found something else to do besides watch her.

  Except that now, she was sure, instead of staring at her, they were talking about her.

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself.

  Shutting out the hum of the chatter around her, and refusing to look anywhere but at the table in front of her, Sarah finally took a small bite of her sandwich.

  It tasted almost as bad as she felt.

  The perpetual storm inside Nick Dunnigan’s head fell suddenly quiet as he took the first bite of his lasagna, and for a moment the unfamiliar calm inside his head unnerved him. Then, without even looking around, he knew that the girl he’d seen at the door of the Garveys’ house yesterday had walked into the cafeteria.

  How did the voices know before he did?

  Nick felt a sudden urge to run to her, to cling to her, but all he managed to do was glance up from his solitary table at the back of the room. She looked every bit as awkward as he always felt as she struggled with her tray and her backpack while everyone else in the room just stared at her and wouldn’t even let her sit at their tables.

  The voices in his head began their mumbling again, and at first Nick couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. But as the girl went from table to table, searching for a place to set her tray down, and was being turned away from seat after seat, the voices began to whisper to him about what he should do to all the kids who were shutting her out.

  Nick’s palms began to sweat.

  And then she looked over at him, almost as if she knew he was watching her.

  And knew what was going on in his mind.

  Their eyes met and every nerve in Nick’s body tingled as if a jolt of electricity had just run through him.

  The voices in his head quieted, too, as if they as well as he had been shocked into silence.

  Shamed, he looked down, but prayed that she would come sit with him.

  She didn’t, of course.

  And the voices began discussing among themselves what they would do to each of the kids sitting at Tiffany Garvey’s table.

  Nick looked over at Tiffany, and her face seemed to melt before his eyes.

  Bonnie Shupe burst into flames and her agonizing screams tore through his mind as the flesh on her skull charred and flaked off.

  Across from Bonnie, Beth Armstrong’s head—severed by an invisible machete—toppled onto the table and rolled between the lunch trays, her blank eyes wide open and staring at the other girls.

  And inside Nick’s head the terrible voices screamed in glee at the mayhem they were showing him.

  Nick clamped his eyes closed, bent over so his head was as low as he could get it, and squeezed his temples with both hands.

  Stop, he silently begged. Leave me alone!

  He wanted to rip his hair out, but knew it wouldn’t help.

  He wanted to scream back at them, to order them to silence, but the last time he did that, his father had taken him to the state hospital, where things were even worse than what went on in his head.

  He opened his eyes, staring down at his cold lasagna, wishing himself invisible to everyone around him, when another sound, sharp and intermittent, slashed through the cacophony in his mind.

  The alarm on his cell phone.

  Nick groped in his pocket for his phone, silenced it, then turned his attention to his backpack, struggling to keep his eyes from wandering even for an instant to the horror going on around him. His fingers closed on a pill bottle, he shook one out and washed it down with milk.

  “Taking your crazy pill, Nick?” someone yelled from across the cafeteria.

  “Wouldn’t want you to miss your pill,” someone else said. “You might become normal.”

  “Nah,” came an instant rejoinder. “He’ll never be normal.”

  Once it started, the mocking only grew worse as everyone around him fed on one another’s insults.

  Get out!

  He had to get out before the new girl heard them, before she understood what they were saying, who they were talking about. He couldn’t let her see him the way the rest of them did. Nick grabbed his book bag, picked up his tray, and started toward the door. He kept his eyes straight ahead, ignored the taunts, tried to ignore the hallucinations, but all around him blood was spurting from torn arteries, faces were dissolving as if doused in acid, and maggots tumbled from empty sockets where the eyes that were watching him should have been.

  He dropped his tray on the counter next to the kitchen door, then fled to the library, where at least he might hide in the stacks until his medicine kicked in.

  But one of these days the medicine wasn’t going to work anymore.

  And then his only hope might be the girl whose mere presence seemed to calm the voices, if not completely silence them.

  Sarah paused at the door of the art room, steeling herself against the glare she’d receive from the teacher for being five minutes late for the last class of the day. Then would come the stares of her classmates. But she’d moved as fast as she could, and as she pushed her way into the art studio, her whole body ached.

  Instead of glaring at her, though, the teacher actually smiled, pausing in the midst of distributing oversized sheets of drawing paper to the class. “Come on in. You must be Sarah Crane.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Sarah muttered, sliding as inconspicuously as she could into the closest empty chair to the door. She shrugged out of her heavy backpack and let it drop to the floor next to her seat.

  “You’ve all read the textbook about perspective,” the teacher said, laying a sheet of heavy drawing paper on the table in front of Sarah. “Today we’re going to put that theory into practice.”

  But Sarah hadn’t read the textbook and knew nothing about perspective. So here was yet another class for which she was completely unprepared. She gazed down at the blank sheet of paper the teacher placed in front of her and wondered what she was going to do. But then the teacher was speaking again, and Sarah felt a twinge of hope—she was giving the class a quick review of the text, and though she seemed to be talking to the whole class, Sarah had a feeling the words were being spoken just for her.

  She stole a look at her class schedule to remind herself of the teacher’s name.

  Philips. Bettina Philips.

  “Things that
are closer are larger,” Ms. Philips was saying as Sarah looked up again. “If you draw a road, the telephone poles closest are tallest and biggest. For the picture to appear real, everything in it must be focused on a vanishing point somewhere in the picture. You also have to consider the point of view of the artist. Where is the artist—or photographer—situated in order to capture the scene? So now I want all of you to think of something to draw, and concentrate on showing it from your perspective.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and an image of the huge house that had haunted her nightmares rose in her memory. But today, with a blank sheet of paper in front of her, the details of the structure were far clearer than they’d been in her dreams. It was a stone house with a gabled roof, and she tried to imagine it with morning sun throwing shadows on the angles of the roof. And if she were farther from it than she ever was in her dreams, looking at it from maybe a hundred yards from its southeast corner … She opened her eyes, blinked at the bright fluorescent lights, and picked a medium brown oil pastel crayon from the box on her table.

  Her hand moving quickly, she began to draw.

  A few minutes later she felt someone behind her, and twisted around to see the teacher looking down at what she was drawing. As if she sensed how difficult it was for Sarah to move in the chair, the woman crouched down so their heads were on the same level. “Hi,” she said quietly. “Welcome to the class. I’m Miss Philips.”

  Sarah found herself looking into a kindly pair of blue eyes in a face framed by light brown hair that flowed straight down her back. She was wearing exactly the kind of clothes an artist should wear: a long skirt, a brightly patterned blouse, and a purple velvet vest. Exactly the kind of thing she herself would have worn if she hadn’t grown up on a farm. “Hi,” she said, instinctively liking Bettina Philips.

  “You’re doing a good job there,” Miss Philips whispered, tapping a forefinger on Sarah’s paper. “Keep at it.” Then she stood up and continued making the rounds of the classroom, murmuring suggestions and encouragement as she moved from one student to another.

  Sarah looked back at her drawing, but suddenly couldn’t concentrate as she remembered the warmth in Miss Philips’s eyes. She tried visualizing the house again, tried to remember how the walkway went up from the circular drive to the double front doors, but somehow couldn’t quite bring back the image as clearly as she had seen it before the teacher stopped to talk with her. She looked up to see that Miss Philips was now bent over the drawing of one of the other students, but as if sensing her gaze, the teacher looked up and gave her a smile.

  Sarah’s face warmed, and she went back to her drawing, and the image of the old rock house was once again clear in her mind. It had big shutters on the front and the side, and she quickly sketched them onto the paper. As her hand transferred the image from her mind to the paper, she worked faster, quickly losing track of the time.

  When the bell rang, everyone around her scrambled to pick up their things and get out of the classroom as quickly as possible. “Don’t forget to put your name on your drawings,” Miss Philips told them, raising her voice above the rustling of the class. “And the pastels go back in the cabinet.”

  Sarah waited until everyone else was out the door before she hauled her backpack from the floor to the desk, then finally pulled herself to her feet, holding on to the table for support.

  “You’ve got a lot of talent,” Miss Philips said, seeming not even to notice how hard it had been for her to rise from the chair. “But then I’m sure you already know that, don’t you?” she added, grinning at Sarah without so much as a hint of pity.

  “I just like to draw,” Sarah said, signing her name and handing the sketch to the teacher. “Usually I draw people, but this was fun.”

  Bettina Philips laid the drawing flat on the table and looked at it. “Do you know this house?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “It just sort of came into my mind.”

  “Really? You just imagined this?”

  Sarah nodded, and struggled with her backpack.

  Miss Philips added the drawing to the stack of paper already on her desk, reached over and lifted up the bottom of Sarah’s backpack so she could slip the straps over her shoulders.

  “Thanks,” Sarah said, settling the weight evenly.

  “I’m glad you’re in this class,” Bettina said. “You’ll do very well.”

  She looked up at the teacher one more time and felt an easy warmth flow through her.

  Seventh period art had just become her favorite class of the day.

  Chapter Six

  Bettina Philips turned her battered Mini Cooper onto the rutted driveway and through the ornate wrought-iron gates that hung rusted and crooked from two once-proud granite columns that were now so covered with moss and lichen that the inscription carved into them when they were new was now illegible. Sighing softly at the decay, Bettina downshifted and gunned the little car up the long curving driveway toward the house she’d lived in all her life.

  When she was little, a gardener had been employed for almost half the year in an attempt to keep the grounds of the old mansion up to her grandfather’s exacting standards, but after he died, the gardener was the first expense to be cut, but hardly the last. And Shutters—as the house had always been known—fell into worse disrepair every year since. Bettina did what she could to try to keep the place up, but just paying the heating bill in the winter was beyond her meager salary, and when the shortest and coldest days came, she retreated to the kitchen and her studio, letting the rest of the house freeze.

  Someday the historical society would make her an offer she couldn’t refuse, hopefully before the manse was beyond repair.

  She parked in the garage, entered the house through the kitchen door, and called to her two dogs and three cats, but as usual none of them came to greet her. That was all right; one by one they’d eventually show themselves, eyeing her suspiciously and looking vaguely guilty, as if they had been up to no good while she was at work.

  She moved on through the big kitchen and through the huge dining room and the salon beyond, coming finally to the north side of the house, where she had turned her great-great-grandfather’s old conservatory into an art studio.

  As was her ritual, Bettina took a moment to look out the back windows, across the terrace, and down the broad lawn to the shore of Shutters Lake. The waterfowl had long ago flown south, but the lake still held its ethereal beauty, looking different every day of every season. Now, in late fall, the lake was rippled with a northern breeze, a precursor of the bitter cold to come. What was left of the cattails drooped in the fading afternoon sun. Soon, the lake would be frozen over and snow would cover everything, and the eerie silence of winter would fall over not only the lake, but the house as well.

  Bettina took a deep breath, unzipped the portfolio containing her students’ work for the day, and laid its contents on her worktable. The top drawing was the one done by Sarah Crane, the new girl with the crippled leg.

  Sarah had done a study of a stone house, using a single brown pastel crayon, which gave the drawing an old, sepia-toned mood. Her talent was evident in every stroke of the sketch. Her perspective was precisely correct, from the artful shadows on the gabled, multilevel roof to the corresponding aspects of the roofline with the shutters on the front and side. She’d accomplished a lot in a very limited amount of time, even adding touches—more like indications, actually—of landscaping and shading on some of the stones around the heavy, double front door.

  The door.

  Bettina stood back and looked at the drawing again.

  Shutters?

  She moved the drawing under the light and looked more closely. Sarah’s drawing looked much like a smaller version of her own house. The house in the drawing had a gabled roof and a circular drive similar to hers and oversized shutters very much like the ones that had not only given her house its name, but the lake upon whose shores it had been built as well.

  But Shutters had a carriage house�
�now her garage—to the east, and servants’ quarters to the west. An enormous maple tree, the leaves of which were now falling fast and blowing into the angles of the house and roof, stood in the center of the circular drive.

  Still, despite the differences, the similarities could not be denied.

  Bettina looked up through the conservatory’s enormous roof of glass. Daylight was fading, but if she went out now, she’d still have time to see the front of the house clearly before it was obscured by dusk. She hurried across the large marble-floored foyer, an orange tabby cat scuttling out of her way and ducking under the massive round table.

  Bettina opened the great front door and took the drawing out into the cold twilight. Crisp brown leaves swirled around her ankles in the wind and she shivered in her light sweater, but there wasn’t time to go back for a jacket.

  Holding the sketch high, she backed away from the house onto the big driveway and began working her way toward a point of view that might duplicate the one in Sarah Crane’s drawing.

  There wouldn’t be one, of course, since Sarah’s house existed only in her imagination, but even in the face of this impossibility, Bettina had a feeling she would find something close.

  Something very close.

  She found herself in front of the garage, the old servants’ quarters on the other side and to the rear of the house hidden by the house itself. Again she held the drawing up in front of her, blocking off the view of the garage, and there it was.

  With the leaves stripped from the enormous trees, she could see that the complex, multilevel roofline on Sarah Crane’s drawing perfectly matched that of the old house. The windows were all in the same place, and though there were different details on the double front door, the shiver that ran up Bettina’s arms was not caused by the chill November air.