Room of Shadows

by Ronald Kidd

  —unless Kennedy gave him not one hundred dollars, but the entire roll of bills. Hundreds!

  Reynolds never described the trance. Never mentioned the bell.

  Kennedy, desperate, demanded proof of Reynolds’s story. Reynolds opened the coffin.

  Light from a lantern streamed in. I could not move. I could not open my eyes. I could not cry out: for the love of God, wake me up!

  The lid shut. The light went out. Darkness closed in.

  Reynolds took the money and fled. Kennedy, horrified, put the coffin in the room and closed it off forever. It became my tomb.

  I had tried to escape burial. Instead, I had suffered the most terrifying fate of all.

  I was buried alive.

  Chapter 16

  I Nearly Threw Up

  Libby was wide awake when I saw her Monday morning. I was getting some things out of my locker at school when I spotted her coming down the hallway. She was wearing the simplest possible outfit—jeans and a sweatshirt—but on her they looked great.

  I wondered what she had thought about my midnight phone call. I’d been all set to pour out my guts when she had nodded off, a victim of my magnetic personality. Had she even noticed what I was saying?

  As I moved toward her, someone screamed.

  The weird thing was, it was a guy. You don’t hear guys scream every day, especially not like this. It was as if something had been ripped from him—hair, lungs, heart.

  Sprinting toward the sound, I spotted Buzz Albright standing in front of his locker. The door was open, and he was staring in horror, shrieking uncontrollably. My locker was close by, so I was the first to reach him. I looked over his shoulder to see what he was staring at.

  I nearly threw up.

  Inside the locker was his cat Lucky, or at least her body. Someone had grabbed her, pulled the green ribbon tight, and twisted.

  A dozen other people crowded in behind me and looked.

  “Oh my God,” someone groaned. “Who would do that?”

  Buzz hadn’t noticed, but there was something else in the locker, a sheet of paper. On it was familiar, blocky writing. I reached inside and picked up the paper.

  The canvas is black. The brush is red.

  Painting in pain is my art.

  I’ll sit and smile and wait a while,

  Then I’ll cut out your heart.

  —The Raven

  * * *

  “The Raven strikes again,” said Sergeant Clark. “What do you make of it, David?”

  It was later that morning, after the pandemonium had died down. Word about the cat had spread like fire through the crowded hallway. Ms. Fein had arrived to find me holding the note, with Buzz still screaming in my ear. She had managed to calm down the students, then had called the police, asked the custodian to watch the locker, and escorted Buzz and me to her office. As we left, I had noticed Libby, a thoughtful expression on her face, watching me from across the hall.

  Now, in Ms. Fein’s office, I perched on the edge of a metal chair. Buzz Albright stood beside Sergeant Clark. Ms. Fein watched me from behind her desk, the way you might eye a spider in the bathroom sink.

  “You were the first person on the scene,” said Clark. “I just wondered if you noticed anything or saw anyone who looked suspicious.”

  I shrugged. “My locker was nearby, that’s all. I didn’t see anything.”

  “She was just a cat,” said Buzz in a shaky voice. “Why would anyone do this?”

  “Ask him,” said Clark, nodding toward me.

  I sat up straight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Whenever the Raven strikes, you’re never far away,” said Clark.

  I stared at him. “You think I had something to do with this?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Both times, you were the first person on the scene. It’s strange, that’s all.”

  “We asked Buzz who might want to hurt him,” said Ms. Fein. “He told us about your argument on the practice field. He said you were pretty mad.”

  I thought about Lucky, hanging there like a slab of meat. “Mad enough to kill?”

  She studied me. I knew what she was thinking. I had tried it once with Jake Bragg. Next to Jake, what was a cat?

  “Wesley Gault shoved you on the front steps of the school, and the Raven tied him up like a mummy,” said Ms. Fein. “Buzz embarrassed you in front of the band, and the Raven killed his cat. Could there be a connection?”

  As much as I hated to admit it, she had a point. I got mad, and the Raven got even. He had done what I wanted to do but was afraid to try.

  The Raven was loose in the world, doing terrible things. Was he doing them for me?

  Chapter 17

  Thump

  I hung around the house, drinking beer.

  That’s a joke. Actually, I couldn’t have had any if I’d wanted to. After the window incident, I noticed that my mom had emptied all the beer out of the fridge. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

  She had heard about the cat and the Raven, first through the neighborhood grapevine and then in a public announcement and a personal phone call from Ms. Fein. My mom doesn’t scare easily, but I could tell this was getting to her. That night she pumped me for information, wondering why I’d been there, what I knew, and how dangerous it was. When she was finished, I trudged upstairs. I locked my bedroom door, went into the closet, and entered the room.

  I switched on the lantern, and shadows jumped up all around me. They danced as I walked. I stood by the desk and remembered sitting there, writing as if my life depended on it.

  Something had come to life and invaded my world. Whoever the Raven was, he seemed to know all about me. He was at my school and outside my window. He was just out of sight, laughing and thumbing his nose.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

  The wooden raven stared. The only sound was the floor creaking beneath my feet.

  I left the room, closed the door, pulled the panel shut, and stepped out of the closet. I needed a friend, and it seemed that I had just one.

  I tried Libby’s phone, and she answered. Now the hard part: making sure she didn’t fall asleep.

  I said, “Crazy day, huh?”

  “It was awful,” she said.

  “I wanted to see you afterward, but they took me to Ms. Fein’s office. Sergeant Clark was there. He had gone over the locker. No fingerprints. Just that note.”

  “Who’s doing it?” asked Libby.

  I laughed nervously. “Sergeant Clark asked me the same thing.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you think I said? I have no clue.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true, is it?”

  “Huh?”

  “The room—it’s full of clues.”

  “That room is mine,” I snapped. “Not yours or Sergeant Clark’s or anybody else’s.”

  Libby didn’t say anything. Maybe she was thinking about the broken window I didn’t report or the way I’d beaten up Jake Bragg or the evil twin I’d told her about. I could feel him moving around inside me. He was angry, the way he always was.

  “I have to go,” I said and hung up.

  * * *

  It was midnight on Friday. I hadn’t slept well all week. I had tossed and turned, angry at Jake Bragg, Ms. Fein, Sergeant Clark, my dad—all of them. When I woke up, it seemed that the clock always showed twelve. Bells tolled in my head. The corpse jerked to life and sat up straight. Sometimes it was Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes it was me.

  The bedsheets were damp. I’d been sweating again. When did that start? When did all this start? When would it end?

  I had always liked the darkness. It covered me like a blanket. I could pull it close and wrap it around me. When I was younger I had used a night-light, but no more. That night before bed, like every night, I had closed the window and shut the curtains. My bedroom had been black as ink, like a substance, like a wall
. No one could bother me. No one could make fun of me. I was alone.

  Except I wasn’t.

  Someone was in the room. I’m not sure how I knew. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t hear him.

  “Hello,” I said.

  No one answered.

  “I know you’re there.”

  I lunged toward him. I got air. I thrashed around, trying to touch him, to grab him, but I couldn’t.

  He was laughing silently. I was sure of it.

  “Shut up,” I moaned. “Please.”

  Suddenly the room seemed cold. I shivered.

  I could have turned on the light. I could have opened the door. I could have done lots of things, but I didn’t. I sat there, staring into the perfect darkness.

  It started as a feeling and became a sound, a low thump repeated over and over again. It grew louder. The bed shook. The walls leaned in, though I couldn’t see them. The sound crawled over me, wrapped around me, burrowed inside me.

  It was my heart.

  Thump thump. Thump thump.

  When I woke up the next morning, the curtains were pulled back and the window was open.

  Chapter 18

  The Book Was Leaking

  “How’s Libby?” my mom asked at breakfast.

  I looked up from my phone. “Huh? Oh, fine.”

  “She seems like a nice girl.”

  “She’s okay,” I said.

  “Have you seen her since the football game?”

  “Mom,” I said, “it’s not like she’s my girlfriend.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  My mom was scheduled to work the weekend shift at the library. After the cat incident, she was more nervous than ever about leaving me home alone, so she asked me to come with her. I have to admit, I didn’t complain. If I was going to spend another day staring at the walls, they might as well have books on them. Besides, I had a project in mind.

  When we got there, I went to a computer terminal to check the library catalog. I looked up Edgar Allan Poe, then went to the shelves and found a collection of his stories. Settling into a big overstuffed chair, I began to read.

  Two things immediately became clear. Poe was crazy, and he was a great writer. Reading his stories was like entering a dark cave, with water dripping and bats diving and small furry creatures brushing against your legs. Every step gave you a new view: a corpse, a candle, a bottomless vortex, a young woman whose face once was lovely but now was a skull. There were twists and turns, dead ends and drop-offs, deep pits and high ceilings. There was horror and beauty. There was everything you had ever dreamed of, if you drank too much and your father hated you and your mind was like a jewel but no one cared.

  I read story after story: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I started “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As I read, flames leaped. Flesh burned. Screams overwhelmed me, and smoke filled my eyes.

  Maybe the strangest story was “William Wilson.” One of Poe’s creepiest creations, William Wilson went to school with a boy who had the same name, the same appearance, even the same birthday—a virtual twin. The twin followed Wilson through school and into adulthood, tormenting him, haunting him, making his life miserable. Finally, unable to stand it anymore, Wilson turned on the twin and plunged a sword into his chest. The twin, covered with blood, looked up with Wilson’s own eyes and face, telling Wilson he had murdered himself. I thought of my own evil twin. Did I have a William Wilson?

  As I read, I started recognizing things. What I’d seen over the past few days began popping up in Poe’s stories, reflecting my own life like one of those creepy fun-house mirrors.

  First was the mummy. In Poe’s story, it was jolted awake by an electrical shock, then blinked its eyes, shook its fist, and sneezed.

  Then there was Lucky. Poe’s cat was black, but its death was the same: hanging, strangled, one eye gouged out.

  Finally came the nighttime visitor. In Poe, he sneaked into his victim’s room and stood silently in the darkness. The sleeper awakened and moaned. The only sound was the beating of a heart.

  They say the great thing about reading is that you can meet people and experience things you’ve never known. Whole worlds come to life on the page. They don’t tell you the other part, though. After you’ve met the people and experienced the beauty and horror, you can close the book. You can go back to your life, sure that the monster with green eyes and fiery breath is shut inside the pages—flat, lifeless, harmless. Reading gives you danger without danger, pain without pain, death without death.

  That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But in my world, the book was leaking. Terror seeped out. Blood ran down my arms and pooled on the floor. Misery filled the room like a fog. I wasn’t just reading Poe. I was living him.

  Suddenly panicked, I slammed the book shut. When I did, something moved. It was just a flash, a dark shadow at the corner of my eye. I turned, and it disappeared between the shelves.

  After dropping the book, I jumped to my feet and hurried over to look. The aisle was empty. But through the shelves I saw movement in the next aisle. When I got there, it was empty once again. I kept looking, but he was gone.

  I felt like a character in one of the stories, doomed to chase a phantom for the rest of my days. The Raven, if that’s who it had been, was still one step ahead of me.

  One hundred sixty-five years.

  Do you have any idea how long that is? Do you know how much longer it would be if you were trapped in the darkness, dangling between life and death?

  Perhaps I went insane. Perhaps I was distilled, compressed, hardened like a diamond.

  Mesmer, you see, had been right. Spirits have a life of their own. They churn. They quiver. They reach out, seeking the spirits of people and objects.

  First was the carving.

  In the days when I had hands, I had learned to whittle. To my amazement, a shape had emerged. It was a raven, big and ghastly grim. When I finished, I painted the feathers black and the eyes red. I kept it in the room, where it stared at me as I wrote. It was more than a raven. It was death itself, beckoning. It crept into my stories and later became a poem.

  My spirit found the carving, black and terrible, and lit it up from the inside. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.

  My spirit swirled. It reached out.

  And found you.

  Chapter 19

  A Muffled Scream

  It was called Four-Leaf Clover Day.

  The idea came from Ms. Fein, who said she was sick of watching the Raven terrorize our school. To boost school spirit, she had announced Four-Leaf Clover Day, when students would be honored for special service to the school. The highlight would be an all-school assembly where awards would be presented.

  I hadn’t seen Libby for nearly a week, but when I entered the auditorium on the afternoon of the assembly, I found myself looking for her. She was near the front, next to an empty seat. Gathering my courage, I slid in beside her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  We stared at the front of the auditorium.

  She said, “You know that night when you called me? You said you didn’t have any clues.”

  “Yeah?” I said, bracing myself.

  “I decided you were right. You really are clueless.”

  I glanced over at her. There was a hint of a smile on her face. Suddenly the day was a little brighter.

  The mood was broken when an explosion rocked the auditorium. It turned out to be Ms. Fein tapping the microphone. “Is this thing on?”

  After the traditional earsplitting feedback and a quick welcome, Mr. McGill pounded out the National Anthem on the piano, then Ms. Fein stepped back up to the microphone. It was on a podium at the front of the stage with closed curtains behind it. Ms. Fein was in rare form, like a drill sergeant with mascara.

  Pounding the podium, she bellowed, “We are the Fighting Irish, and we will not be intimi
dated! Do you hear me?”

  We heard her, but nobody said much of anything. It didn’t seem to faze her. She explained how the idea of Four-Leaf Clover Day had come to her, then she began handing out little green trophies—lots of them. There were awards for leadership, school spirit, neatness, promptness, best smile, best braces, best shoes, best accessories. As she handed Arnie Goldman the award for left-handed penmanship, the curtains behind her started to open.

  I leaned over to Libby. “The grand finale,” I said. “This should be good.”

  The funny thing was, Ms. Fein kept right on talking, as if she didn’t know about it. A moment later, I saw why.

  The curtains drew back to reveal a large pendulum suspended by a cable from above, swinging from side to side across the stage, the way a pendulum swings in a grandfather clock. But instead of a simple weight at the end, there was a rounded blade, the kind you’d find on a scythe. The blade gleamed in the lights, and with each swing, it dipped a little lower. Beneath it, someone was bound and gagged, wearing a blindfold.

  The crowd gasped. It was Jake Bragg.

  As shocking as the sight was, it was familiar to me. A similar scene had been described in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” one of the Poe stories I had just read.

  Ms. Fein, finally turning around to notice, shrieked, “Everyone, stay calm!”

  Without thinking, I leaped from my seat and raced to the front of the auditorium, with Libby right behind me. As we mounted the stage, I saw that Jake was tied to a bench with his arms at his sides, exposing his chest.

  The blade swung again.

  It hissed by, just an inch from Jake’s shirt.

  The place was in an uproar. I shouted to Libby, “Let’s move the bench!”

  We tried, but it wouldn’t budge. I glanced down and saw that it had been bolted to the stage.

  The blade swung again.

  There was a muffled scream. The blade had sliced the shirt, and beneath it, a neat red stripe appeared on Jake’s chest.

  “What’ll we do?” Libby yelled desperately.

  We couldn’t move the bench. There was no time to untie him. So I did the only thing I could think of.