Hangman's Curse

by Frank Peretti

  Baker High School had a nice workout room equipped with weight machines, treadmills, barbells, a rowing machine, the works. Ian Snyder had never been in this room before, at least voluntarily, and Elijah could understand why. Rooms like this could easily become the exclusive territory of the jocks, the athletes, the physically oriented, a place where guys worked their bodies, tried to outdo each other, and carried out seek-and-destroy missions against the physically inferior. The skinny kids, the chubby kids, the just plain nonathletes weren’t barred from the place, but most of them quickly learned that any personal program of physical fitness wasn’t worth the humiliation.

  Elijah and Ian had been talking about that at lunch. They started out talking about self-defense. It turned out Ian was quite impressed with Elijah’s skill—and that got them on the subject of physical fitness and how it would be a good thing, even fun, if it weren’t such a drag, which got them thinking: Why does it have to be a drag? Can’t a guy get some exercise without being made to feel like a wimp?

  And then Elijah saw a chance to spend just a little more time with Ian Snyder and get to know him better. “Let’s sign up for the rowing machine,” he said, all excited.

  “Naw . . . ,” said Ian.

  “Yeah! Come on! You and me! Strength in numbers!”

  “Naw . . .”

  “Just doing our own thing, going our own speed, just so we can say we did it.”

  “I’ve never even used a rowing machine.”

  That got Elijah even more excited. “Hey! A new experience! I love it!”

  So here they were, Ian rowing, Elijah coaching and encouraging, having a great time. And Elijah was able to confirm what he had suspected all along, that Ian Snyder was not nearly as “freaky” as his classmates were so quick to assume. He had a very normal, very human side. He could laugh, he could joke, he could smile and carry on a warm and friendly conversation. All he really needed was a friend, someone who saw right through his weird exterior and cared about the person inside.

  “Okay,” said Elijah, “one and a half kilometers to go. Gotta get mean now, gotta get hungry! Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!”

  Ian stepped up his pace, pulling, pulling, pulling, the machine’s fan-bladed flywheel spinning up a good breeze, his face filled with a new determination. It was wonderful to see.

  Wonderful, but still tough. While Ian was first figuring out the machine, Elijah got several good looks at the soles of his shoes and knew they matched perfectly one set of footprints he’d photographed under the building the previous night. Given all they knew, there could be little doubt that Ian had been there. It wasn’t outlandish to think that the voice they had heard and recorded last night belonged to this young man now sweating and rowing his way toward the digital finish line.

  So . . . okay, Lord, Elijah kept praying, what next? Where do we go from here?

  “Hey, angel! What are you doing in here?”

  Ian stopped rowing, and the humanness left his face. Elijah turned to see a big guy in running shorts striding toward them. He’d seen this guy before, sauntering around the halls, smirking his way around the lunchroom. This was trouble.

  “Come on, angel,” he said, motioning for Ian to get off the machine—and he meant “angel” as a smear, not a compliment. “Turn it over.”

  “We signed up for this machine. It’s ours for fifteen more minutes,” Elijah said.

  The big guy just sneered. “Too bad. It’s mine now.” He grabbed Ian by the arm. “Off the machine.”

  Ian jerked his arm free, his face filling with rage.

  Now three guys at the pressing bench started watching. “Whoooaaa,” they said, “better watch it, Hanley! He’s got a ghost working for him, remember?” Obviously, they all thought that was very funny.

  Elijah stepped up, his head coming to the level of the big guy’s chest. “Hey. There are rules. There are policies. We signed in fair and square. You have to wait your turn.”

  The big guy’s friends were watching. He grabbed two fistfuls of Elijah’s tee shirt and lifted Elijah off his feet. “What did you say?”

  Well, thought Elijah, all he can do is kill me. “I said—”

  “HEY!” There was no mistaking the gruff, gravelly roar of Mr. Marquardt. He was striding their way, every eye in the place upon him, whistle around his neck, clipboard in hand.

  The big guy set Elijah down and Elijah straightened out his shirt as he thought, All right, now we’ll get some justice around here.

  “Snyder,” Marquardt hollered, “get off that machine!”

  Ian got up.

  “Thanks, freak,” said the big guy, taking over.

  “But we reserved the rowing machine for half an hour!” Elijah protested.

  Marquardt gave no indication of hearing him. “Okay, Hanley, five kilometers, starting now!” He started a stopwatch. Hanley started rowing. “Looking good, looking good.”

  Ian brushed past Elijah. “Let’s go.”

  Elijah approached to Mr. Marquardt. “Excuse me, Mr. Marquardt—”

  “I am busy!” Marquardt roared in his face. “Get out of here!”

  It took a moment for Elijah to accept that there was nothing more he could do or say. Marquardt, Hanley, and the three guys on the pressing bench owned this little club; and he and Ian were out, policy or no policy, sign-up sheet or no sign-up sheet.

  By the time he joined Ian on the sidewalk outside, he was furious. “I don’t believe this!”

  Ian had his old steely gaze back, but was much calmer, as if resigned to it. “I saw it coming.”

  “We signed up. Marquardt had the sign-up sheet right on his desk! I know because I put it there!”

  “His athletes get priority.”

  “That’s not what the rules say!”

  “Welcome to Baker High.”

  Elijah was genuinely angry. “Would you please explain this to me?”

  Ian thought a moment, then gave a little shrug. “There are two Baker High Schools. There’s the one everybody wants to see—the one with the rules and the policies and the cool principal walking around in her business suits and all the happy students in their name-brand clothes. It’s got the honor roll and the trophies in the display case, the honor students and the athletes get their pictures in the paper, and nothing bad ever happens, and look! We have metal detectors, the first in the county!

  “And then . . . there’s you and me standing out here while certain people do whatever they want at our expense. They set up their own little club, decide who gets in, then dump on everybody else. They spit on ’em, push ’em around, trip ’em, slap ’em, steal their clothes and their money, grab ’em where they shouldn’t be grabbed. The teachers have the power to do something about it but don’t, and the parents . . . well, they just make us come here every day, that’s all. That’s the other Baker High.”

  Elijah was trying to think clearly and objectively about all this. Not everyone at Baker was as Ian had described, but still, all he could see was Hanley lifting him off his feet—assaulting him— and Marquardt not doing a thing about it. “If I found out my kid was being treated this way, I’d sure do something about it.”

  “Well, my parents—” He stopped right there. Then he said, “Well, sometimes you just have to take care of yourself, Elijah. Nobody’s going to do it for you.”

  Elijah had no answer.

  “What would you like to see done to that guy?”

  Elijah looked at those cold, dark eyes. “Who?”

  “Marquardt. What would you like to see happen to him?”

  That tipped Elijah just a little off balance. Was Ian really going to invite him into the darker side of his life? Elijah kept his own anger out of it when he asked, “What did you have in mind?”

  Ian drew a long breath, then just leaned back and smiled. “Oh . . . something.”

  7

  a my and

  crystal

  Julia Baynes, Leonard Baynes’ mother, was hardly presentable when Nate, Sara
h, and Tom Gessner knocked on her door. She hadn’t had a shower, she reeked of cigarette smoke, and years of alcohol had noticeably dampened her wits. The fact that she had no husband did not help matters any, and now, to top it all off, her son was in critical condition in the hospital.

  “Hello, Mrs. Baynes,” said Gessner. “You remember Nate Springfield?”

  She stared at Nate blankly.

  “From the hospital?” Gessner prompted.

  It registered. “Oh! Yeah! Hi.”

  “This is his wife, Sarah.”

  “Hi.” She shook Sarah’s hand, then looked at Gessner. “So, what’s up?”

  Gessner spoke gently. “We made an appointment, remember? To see Leonard’s room?”

  “Yeah, right. Come in.” She stood aside, hardly looking at them.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Baynes,” said Sarah. “We’ll try not to be long.”

  Nate had Mr. Maxwell at his side. “Do you mind if our dog comes in to help us search?”

  She shrugged, lighting another cigarette. “I like dogs. Take all the time you need.”

  “Could you show us Leonard’s room?” Nate asked.

  She drew a breath through the cigarette and the smoke came out her mouth as she said, “This way.”

  They passed through the small, messy living room, stepping through old magazines and junk mail that littered the worn carpet, and down a narrow hall. Leonard’s room was at the end.

  “Sorry for the mess,” Mrs. Baynes said.

  “It’s quite all right,” said Sarah, surveying the cramped, cluttered bedroom. “Are any of Leonard’s—” When she turned, Mrs. Baynes was walking away from them, up the hall. “Uh, Mrs. Baynes?”

  Mrs. Baynes hesitated as if someone may have called her name. “Huh?”

  “Are any of Leonard’s things—you know, coats, hats, things he takes to school—would they be anywhere else in the house besides here in his room?”

  She said, “I dunno,” and shuffled around the corner into the kitchen.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” said Gessner, going up the hall to speak with Mrs. Baynes.

  Nate and Sarah exchanged a knowing look, then slipped on some surgical gloves and turned to the task at hand.

  “Okay, Max,” Nate said.

  Max started sniffing around the room, going along the floor, poking his nose under the bed, sniffing the dresser.

  The room was a mess, with clothes scattered everywhere. It would take a while to sort through it all—as if they had “a while.” As far as they were concerned, Shawna Miller was next. But her parents were very proud of her perfect attendance record and didn’t want it jeopardized. With Shawna’s careless attitude, there wasn’t much they could do to keep “it” from happening to her.

  As for Crystal Sparks, she was absent from school today and couldn’t be found at home either, so they couldn’t question her further. The search through her locker told them she was into black, slithery clothing, dark makeup, and weird art, but that was all they learned about her—except for a certain scent Max found. Again, he didn’t alert as if he’d found drugs, but he was keenly interested in whatever it was.

  They found nothing in Leonard’s locker, and Max didn’t smell anything of interest either, so now they were searching his room, combing through his socks, shirts, pants, and underwear, scattered CDs, half-broken model cars, and heavy-metal magazines in the hope of finding out what had happened to him and the others.

  While Nate started going through the closet and Max just kept sniffing everywhere, Sarah went through Leonard’s dresser. Every article of clothing was wadded up and mixed in with all the others, and there seemed to be more useless junk in the drawers than clothing. There were some dirty magazines buried in the bottom drawer. She left them there. Atop the dresser was an old photograph of Leonard, his older sister, and both parents. They had been a family at one time. No doubt, Leonard missed those days.

  Nate found a well-worn army surplus jacket in the closet. A vest pocket contained a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, a recent quiz in U.S. government. Leonard got a D. Nate began checking the other pockets. He found a pair of sunglasses in one pocket, a set of keys and some change in another, an old, half-eaten candy bar still in the wrapper in a third, and along with that—

  A soda straw.

  “Sarah . . .”

  She received it from his hand and examined it, looking down one end and then the other. “Looks like some sugar crystals inside.” She sniffed it. “Same as the other one. I’d say we have a pattern here.”

  “Max . . .”

  Max had found the old army coat and now he was craning his neck, sniffing it up and down with that same captivated look in his eyes.

  What is he smelling? Sarah wondered.

  Back in the Holy Roller, she scraped samplings from inside the straw, put the samples into a row of test tubes, and quickly ascertained the same things she found in the previous straw.

  “Sugar, but with another chemical mixed in. My second screening indicated a petroleum base, so it isn’t LSD, cocaine, or meth. I sent a sample back to the university to see if they could figure out what it is. But look here.”

  Nate leaned over her shoulder to take a close look at what she was showing him.

  “See these stains? The sugar seems to have been concentrated in two small areas.” She pointed them out with the tip of her tweezers. “Right here, about two inches from the end, and then here, about two inches from the other end. It’s as if the sugar formed two small plugs at one time, blocking the straw in two places.”

  Nate straightened and thought a moment. “So, if we play ‘what if . . .’ What if these straws are some kind of drug-making or drug-taking device?”

  “If they are, it’s brand-new. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” She sighed in frustration. “I wish these victims weren’t out of their minds. I’d like to ask them about this.”

  “What if they don’t know anything anyway? What if Ian Snyder and his friends are behind this? They could have planted a straw in Tod Kramer’s duffel bag and Leonard Baynes’ pocket.”

  “They could plant a straw just about anywhere—in desks, backpacks, coats, lockers . . .”

  “But what in the world do the straws do, and how do they do it?” Nate drummed his fingers on his chin. “Then again, Ian Snyder and his friends may have nothing to do with it at all. This could be something totally unrelated.”

  “Well . . . Elijah says he might be getting close to something.”

  “In the meantime, we’d better find out everything there is to know about this straw.”

  The next day, during biology class, Elisha volunteered to gather up plant cuttings from the other students and put them all in rooting mix back in the supply room—where Norman happened to be working at the time.

  He was glad to see her, and eagerly helped her measure out the correct proportions of ingredients for the rooting mix. “Two and half peat moss, two and a half vermiculite, three sand . . .”

  “Norman,” she ventured as she scooped out the right amount of sand, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about all this Abel Frye stuff.”

  He sniffed a little chuckle and spoke as he worked. “Abel Frye, the patron saint of the geeks and the nerds, the weird and the weak.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, according to the big legend going around, Abel Frye was a smart kid with plenty of potential, but he was weak and he was different, so the bullies trounced on him. They made his life so miserable that he finally hanged himself. That sort of makes him the patron saint of the nerds, the geeks, the little people: the weak and the weird.” Then he added, “You know, people like me.”

  “Norman. You’re not weird. You are different, but I see that as a quality and not a fault.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not weak?”

  That flustered her a little. “Norman . . . everybody’s weaker than somebody!”

  He sighed, and then he smiled. “And n
ot everybody who’s strong is a bully, either. I’ve tried to keep that in mind. But to answer your question, think about this: Everybody who’s gotten sick and gone crazy was a bully who picked on Ian Snyder. Jim Boltz and his three friends all used to pick on him, and Leonard Baynes, man, that was obvious. So it’s a no-brainer: Ian Snyder’s the one to watch.”

  She was careful to keep her voice down as she said, “I’ve heard a lot of kids say he’s controlling the ghost.”

  That made him laugh, although he tried to laugh quietly. “Well, sure. He wants everyone to think that. It’s his way of fighting back—and it’s working. I think a lot of victims are starting to look up to him.”

  “Victims?”

  “Well, other kids who get picked on.”

  “Like Crystal Sparks, maybe?”

  He thought a moment. “You’ll know who she is the moment you see her. She’s like an Ian Snyder clone. But that’s just it: These other kids think Abel Frye’s going to stick up for them, too, and since Ian controls Abel Frye, they start hanging around with him, joining up with the weird outcasts. It’s a little group all their own, all of them weird. But this ghost stuff is all hysteria. Some of the kids are so into it that they start thinking they’re really seeing and hearing something.”

  “So what really happened to the guys in the hospital?”

  He thought a moment, quite seriously. “That part’s real, but I haven’t a clue what’s doing it. I just don’t think it’s a ghost. The kids are all adding that part to it. They’re blaming it on Abel Frye—which suits Ian Snyder just fine. Whatever’s causing this sickness, he’s taking big advantage of it.”

  “So is he really a witch?”

  Norman was serious when he said, “He and his friends are into some pretty strange things. And if I can be honest, I think your brother better be careful.”

  At lunch, Elijah sat down across the table from Ian, a surefire way to draw stares from around the lunchroom.

  Ian was impressed. “You’ve got a lot of nerve sitting here.”

  Elijah glanced around. Ian was right. Others in the lunchroom were giving him the curious and judgmental eye. Even his buddies from calculus class were staring at him and talking between themselves in hushed, gossipy tones.