Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  Bibi’s mouth made a round O of horror. “The fire escape? They had a fire at Nightmare Hall after the party?”

  Rachel shook her head. “No. No fire. He just … he just fell. During the night.” She couldn’t tell Bibi that Milo hadn’t fallen, that he’d been pushed, because then she’d have to mention the dream. Which Bibi would react to with scorn.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just called there. The housemother told me.”

  Bibi tilted her head, curiosity on her face. “If there wasn’t a fire, what was Milo doing out on the fire escape in the middle of the night? And why were you calling Nightmare Hall at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning in the first place? Did you leave something there last night?”

  Rachel didn’t even hesitate. Bibi had just given her the perfect excuse for the phone call. “An earring. One of the garnet ones. It must have fallen off when I was dancing. And I don’t know what Milo was doing out there during the night,” she lied. “But I think he’s seriously hurt. A head injury, Mrs. Coates said.” She needed desperately to confide in someone about last night’s horrible dream. But if she did decide to tell someone, it wouldn’t be Bibi.

  “Well,” Bibi said, sliding out of bed, “I don’t know Milo very well, but he seemed like an okay guy. I just can’t figure why he would be out on that old fire escape in the middle of the night.” Shaking her head at Milo’s apparent foolishness, Bibi went off to take her shower.

  I have to see the still life again, Rachel thought. Before the artist takes it away, as he did the seascape. Before he changes it. She had to see the staircase image again before the painting was doctored up and delivered to her as a “gift.”

  She jumped from the bed and darted to the closet. Slipping into a pair of jeans and a bright green T-shirt, she pushed her feet into sandals, ran a brush through her hair, grabbed her purse, and hurried from the room.

  She raced across the relatively deserted campus, not even bothering to say hello to the few people she saw.

  When she reached the art building, out of breath, and praying the still life would not be gone from the wall behind the pedestal, Rachel yanked the heavy wooden door open.

  It was dim and cool inside, but not empty. Rudy Samms, armed with a duster and a yellow can of furniture polish, was working at a huge desk in the middle of the lobby.

  “What are you doing here?” he called as she made a dash for the corner where the still life had been hanging.

  She ignored him, focusing her eyes on the wall just ahead of her. When she was close enough, she breathed a sigh of relief. The painting was still there, in the same spot. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched.

  She’d arrived in time.

  No, not quite. Because when she looked more closely at the painting, she realized with a sudden surge of fury that it had indeed been touched. Touched up, she corrected mentally. The stairs and the flailing legs were gone. It was as if they’d never been there. The entire vase was now thickly layered with nothing but dove-gray swirls and brushstrokes.

  She whirled and hurried over to Rudy. She knew he’d been watching her, but now he was pretending to concentrate industriously on his dusting. “Who’s been in here this morning?” Rachel demanded.

  “No one. Just me.” He looked up lazily. “Why?”

  “Are you sure? What time did you get here?”

  “Seven. I’m always in early. No one gets here before me. Of course,” he aimed a sly glance at her, “someone could have come into the lobby while I was upstairs, cleaning up the studios.” He shook his head. “Have to be awfully careful up there, not to damage any of the precious ‘works of art,’” he added sarcastically.

  “You think someone came in while you were upstairs?” Rachel pressed sharply.

  “I didn’t say that. I said, someone might have. I can’t be in two places at the same time, now can I? So,” he shrugged as if to dismiss the matter, “who knows? Why? Something wrong?”

  She wasn’t going to learn anything from him.

  Rachel turned away. She had planned to take the painting with her when she left, take it to the police and show them the stairs and the falling legs hidden within the work. But there was no point now. All they would see was a vase filled with blue and lavender and mauve flowers.

  She turned back to Rudy. “How do you get upstairs?”

  He shot her a contemptuous look. “How do you think, Rachel? You either walk up the stairs or take the elevator, the same way you would in any other building on campus.”

  “I meant,” she said coldly, “where is the staircase?”

  He waved a hand toward the rear of the lobby.

  “Are the rooms up there open? Unlocked, I mean?”

  He nodded.

  “I promised Aidan I’d come and take a look at his masks,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Then why were you looking at that still life?”

  And why are you so suspicious? she almost said. But she knew she needed him, so she said instead, “Aidan has a couple of masks on that wall, too, Rudy. Listen, I need a favor.”

  “What kind of favor? I’m busy.”

  Rachel said pleasantly, “If anyone comes in and goes anywhere near that still life in the corner, would you come up and get me? I’ll be in one of the art studios.”

  “I have work to do,” he objected. “I can’t be watching the door.”

  “Bibi would really be happy if you’d do her roommate this one favor,” Rachel said, hating herself for using Bibi. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Rudy was all she had, and if she had to blackmail him into helping her out, so be it. “Rudy, there’s no way you won’t notice one lone person walking into the lobby. All I want you to do is come and get me. Use the elevator. It’ll only take a second.”

  “Oh, all right. But I’m going to be done in here in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll hurry.”

  And she did. She went from one studio to another, as vague about what she was looking for as she had been at the waterfall. But she couldn’t bear to leave the art building without at least looking around. He had been here sometime during the night, slathering fresh oils on the still life. Maybe he’d left some sign, some clue …

  The studios all smelled of paint and paint thinner. Rachel knew where she’d found the studio where Aidan worked because half a dozen of his masks lay on cloths on a table. There was a faint, mildewy smell of plaster.

  Rachel was drawn to the masks. They were lying on a long, narrow table directly beneath a wall of short, wide windows. She recognized only one of the faces. Samantha’s. There was no mistaking the perfect oval, the high cheekbones, the deep-set eyes, the confident set of the mouth.

  Samantha had been braver than Rachel.

  She wanted to pick up the mask and check the back for Aidan’s initials, part of her hoping that someone else had taken the time and energy to create a mask of Samantha’s face, not Aidan. But she was terrified that she’d drop it and it would smash into a thousand tiny pieces scattered all across the floor. Besides, she knew it was his.

  She turned away from the table and glanced around the room. Did you really expect to find a black-hooded cloak hanging on a hook for everyone to see, perhaps with a bloody baseball bat hanging from its pocket? a voice in her head asked sarcastically.

  She wandered over to a large supply closet, its door standing wide open, on the opposite side of the room. It was dark inside, but Rachel could make out a long, narrow space lined on both sides with floor-to-ceiling shelves and cubbyholes. Rachel stepped cautiously over the threshold. Boxes and cartons and plastic cases of art supplies spilled over the edges of the shelves, stretched empty canvases were stacked on the floor, metal cans of paint thinner sat just inside the door, and long-sleeved smocks had been discarded on the floor at the far end of the closet, forming a multicolored, paint-daubed mound.

  Rachel walked back to the mound. When she noticed the name SAMANTHA WIDDOES written neatly in black ink on the insid
e of a collar, she bent to pick through the pile, searching for Aidan’s smock.

  There … AIDAN MCKAY, scrawled sloppily. Artist or not, his penmanship stank.

  Rachel pulled the wrinkled, paint-stained smock from the pile and slipped her arms into the sleeves. She pulled it closed in front, trying to feel as Aidan must feel when he put it on and went to work. But she only felt silly. It was way too big for her.

  The smell in the closet was giving her a headache.

  She was about to remove the smock when she noticed the colors patchworked across the front. She wasn’t surprised by the dried paint itself. She had known that was there, had expected it when she first picked up the smock. But the colors caught her eye. Or, more precisely, the exact shades of color. Three egg-shaped blotches of bright green. Not the ordinary green of grass or trees, not the green of an avocado or of a turtle shell, but the vivid, startling green that she had only seen in one other place. The seascape. She had seen this exact, unusually vivid shade of green in the seascape.

  And there, on the other side of the smock, half a dozen smaller splotches of a blue almost as brilliant as Aidan’s eyes. The very same shade of blue that had pulled her to the seascape in the first place.

  Below that, on the pocket, a round, uneven circle of the color that Samantha had called “mauve” in the still life. Next to it a slash of lavender and underneath that a blob of cornflower blue. All of the colors found in the still life.

  Still wearing Aidan’s smock, Rachel bent down to finger quickly through the rest of the mound, scrutinizing each of the remaining smocks for paint stains the same shades as those on the smock she was wearing.

  No other smock bore those same telltale shades. Only Aidan’s.

  Rachel stood up, hugging the smock around her. Aidan hadn’t painted those two paintings. He hadn’t. He would have said, if he’d painted them.

  Well, no, Rachel, the voice in her head said, I don’t believe he would have. Because whoever painted those particular works of art is up to no good, right? Isn’t that why you’re here? Because you believe that whoever painted those paintings also pushed Ted Leonides into the river and Milo Keith down the fire escape? Just like in your nightmares? So how likely is it that the artist of those two works would admit to having painted them? Use your head.

  Rachel looked down at the splotches on the front of the smock. Aidan? No, he couldn’t have painted those pictures. He didn’t even like them. At least … he’d said he didn’t like them. And had sounded like he meant it.

  Her purse, which she’d deposited on the floor of the storage closet when she tried on the smock, was a large, roomy brown shoulder bag. Rachel removed the smock, rolled it up into as small a ball as possible and thrust it into the purse. She had no idea what she was going to do with it, but she knew she couldn’t leave it there. It told her something, although she wasn’t sure exactly what.

  When Aidan noticed it was missing, he’d have no reason to connect the disappearance to her.

  Rachel slung the purse over her shoulder and turned to walk back to the door of the closet.

  She was almost there when she noticed a stack of canvases, piled on top of each other, on a high shelf just ahead of her. If they were signed, she might get some idea of each person’s particular style, even with her limited art knowledge. Maybe she could figure out for herself who had painted the seascape and the still life.

  But the shelf was too far up for her to reach.

  Rachel glanced around. There was no ladder. How did they get stuff down from that shelf? Maybe there was a ladder somewhere else. But she didn’t want to waste time looking.

  Instead, she pulled half a dozen unopened cardboard boxes off the shelves and piled them on top of one another, creating her own “ladder.” Dropping her purse on the floor and using a lower shelf as a stepping stool, she climbed onto the box pyramid, stood up, and grasping the edge of the top shelf with one hand, reached upward with the other arm to pull a canvas forward.

  The top canvas was a charcoal sketch of Butler Hall, the administration building. She turned it over, the boxes teetering precariously beneath her. The initials on the back were S. W. Samantha. The drawing bore no resemblance to either of the oil paintings.

  Rachel slid it back into place and was about to pull the second canvas toward her when she heard a noise at the door and then a scuffling sound below her.

  Before she could look down, a voice whispered harshly, “Gotcha!” a forceful blow hit the middle cardboard box, and Rachel’s ladder collapsed beneath her.

  She had her right hand on a canvas as her tower of boxes gave way; her left hand clutched one of the shelves. Crying out in surprise and fear, she dangled, legs waving frantically, for just a second or two, struggling to maintain her hold on the shelf.

  She dropped the canvas and would have grasped the shelf with her right hand, too, but it was too late. The fingers on her left hand were already sliding off the shelf. With a horrified gasp, Rachel began falling to the hard tile floor below.

  Just before she hit the floor, she was vaguely aware of a door closing. The closet disappeared into darkness, followed by the sound of a key turning in a lock.

  Then her head smacked into the tile. Rachel cried out in pain. Her eyes shut, and she disappeared into a deeper darkness of her own.

  Chapter 9

  THE FIRST THING RACHEL was conscious of as she came to was a sharp, unrelenting pain at the back of her skull. When she put a hand back there and withdrew it, it came away warm and sticky.

  She was bleeding.

  It was so dark. Why was it so dark? Dazed and dizzy, Rachel felt a moment of terror, wondering if the blow to the back of her head had rendered her blind.

  Then she remembered where she was, and how the light had gone off just before she fell. She was in the storage closet in an art studio on the tenth floor. And she was locked in.

  Fighting nausea and confusion, she struggled upright. The room whirled like a carousel. She leaned against the shelves for support and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, nothing had changed. She was still sitting on the cold, tile floor of the pitch-black closet.

  The first thing to do, she thought weakly, is get some light in here. All she had to do was stand up, feel her way to the door, and flip the switch. Such a small thing, such an easy task, no problem.

  But by the time she’d accomplished it, her nausea had increased tenfold and her vision was blurred. Her legs were so weak, she could hardly stand. She had to keep one hand on the shelving unit to hold herself upright.

  Still, having the light on helped.

  Rachel rattled the doorknob. Definitely locked.

  Rachel leaned against the door, trying to gather her thoughts and figure out what to do. First, it wasn’t as if she was in a deserted building with no one to help her. Rudy was around somewhere, and besides, this was the last day of the art exhibit. People would be coming to the building to see the paintings and the masks and sculptures before they were gone for good.

  If she yelled and screamed, someone would hear her. Someone would come and let her out.

  Okay, okay, don’t panic, stay calm, she warned, keeping her breathing steady. This building is not empty. All you have to do is scream, at the top of your lungs. Someone will hear you.

  Screaming wasn’t easy, however, not when she was so sick and weak and dizzy. Getting enough air into her lungs to propel her voice through the thickness of the storage closet door and out into the hallway, maybe even all the way down to lower floors if there was no one else on this floor, was difficult. She had to try three times before she could summon up a sound above a whisper.

  Gradually, she managed several loud cries for help. They echoed shrilly in the narrow space around her, each one stabbing at her already aching head like long, sharp needles.

  When no one came in response to her cries, she tried again. Once, twice, three times—screams for help that made her throat raw and her chest ache.

  Not
hing.

  There must be no one on the top floors but her.

  And her screams would never carry all the way down to the lobby, where by now people were probably arriving for the exhibit.

  Rachel took a deep breath, painful to her raw, throbbing throat. Okay. So no one had heard her. She couldn’t just stand here and do nothing. There must be something …

  Her purse. She had several plastic credit cards in her purse. Couldn’t she use one to open the door? She’d seen it done on television. It had looked as if all the detective or policeman did was slip the piece of plastic between the door and the frame. Could it be that easy?

  It was worth a try. The paint fumes in this place weren’t helping her headache any. She wasn’t going to wait around to be rescued.

  Rachel glanced around for her shoulder bag. She had dropped it on the floor when she began her climb up the tower of boxes. It should be here somewhere.

  But, although she went over every inch of the place, scanning the shelves, moving the toppled boxes this way and that, poking behind the cartons of art supplies and the cans of paint thinner, she found no purse.

  The shoulder bag was gone.

  And with it her credit cards.

  And … Aidan’s smock. Rachel flushed guiltily, remembering that she had confiscated the paint-stained smock, rolling it up into a ball and stuffing it inside her purse. But she’d had a good reason, hadn’t she? And now it was gone, gone with the purse and the credit cards that might have helped her out of this mess.

  Her back against the door, she sank to the floor, and put her head in her hands. All she wanted was out of this horrible, smelly place. Was that so much to ask? Checking, she discovered that her head was still bleeding, and wondered how much blood you could lose before you sank into unconsciousness. If she fainted, and no one checked the closet, she might not be discovered until the following morning when the art students arrived and came for their smocks or supplies.

  The thought of spending the entire day and, worse, a whole night, in the narrow, smelly closet was more than Rachel could bear. She pulled herself to her feet again, leaning against the door for support. There had to be a way out of here. Another door, a window?