Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  “Well, I believe you,” Bibi said, taking the watercolor and the calendar page from Rachel. “We need to take these to the security office. But for now, you need to go out and do something to take your mind off all this. I’ll put these things in your top drawer.”

  “We have to take some stuff from the show to the mall,” Sam said. “Rachel, come with us. You can’t stay here alone.”

  “And I won’t be here.” Bibi picked up her own purse. “I promised Rudy I’d help him take a load of paintings to the mall.”

  Rachel didn’t want to go to the mall. She didn’t want to go anywhere. But if Bibi wasn’t going to be here, neither was Rachel. The purse had been delivered to her room. Maybe the mystery artist was lurking outside in the hall at that very moment, chuckling gleefully over her imagined reaction to his “gift.”

  Bibi turned to the others, asking, “How about it? A trip to the mall will do Rachel good. Help her forget about all this stuff. You know what they say: When the going gets tough …”

  “The tough go shopping,” Sam finished, laughing. Just as quickly, she sobered. “This is more than tough going, what’s happening to Rachel. This is very scary stuff. But,” she went on more cheerfully, “it’s probably just a joke, anyway, Rachel. Someone playing games.”

  Rachel didn’t know if anyone else in the room believed that, but she certainly didn’t. Not for a second.

  But she got up and grabbed a jacket from the closet.

  Aidan shrugged and nodded.

  “We’ll have to be back by six to clean up after the exhibit,” Joseph reminded all of them. “But I guess a quick trip to the mall isn’t such a bad idea. And if we take a few of the paintings now, we won’t have so much to take later. I’ll miss seeing new viewers ooh and aah over my work, but I’ve had so much of that already. I wouldn’t want to get a swelled head.”

  “Too late,” Samantha quipped. “Rachel, you ready?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said, pulling on her jacket and following the others out of her room.

  Chapter 13

  THERE WERE STILL SPECTATORS viewing the exhibit when Rachel and her friends arrived, but Paloma suggested they take the first group of jewelry she had had on display, and half a dozen paintings that the artists had replaced with new ones for the last and most important day of the showing.

  Joseph drove to the mall. Samantha shared the front seat with him, a group of canvases at her feet, while Rachel found herself sandwiched into the backseat between Paloma and Aidan. Bibi had decided to stay behind to help Rudy begin the cleanup.

  Paloma carried her jewelry in a white shoe-box on her knees. “Mr. Stein at the jewelry store in the mall wants to see my best pieces,” she said happily. “I figure, if those sell, and I start getting a name for myself, then I won’t have any trouble selling the pieces that aren’t quite as good.”

  “You don’t have any pieces that aren’t quite as good,” Joseph said generously. “Everything I’ve ever seen of yours has been perfect.

  “You’ve never once messed up, the way I did in my pathetic attempts at creating life masks.”

  “How unlike you, Joseph,” Samantha said drily. “That is the first and only time I have ever heard you pay another artist a compliment.”

  “Well, if you’d paint something besides those watercolors that look like they were left out in the rain,” Joseph replied, “I’d compliment you, too.”

  “They’re supposed to look like they were left out in the rain,” Samantha countered.

  “Sam, you haven’t really discovered the power of painting until you’ve worked in oils,” Joseph insisted.

  Rachel stopped listening. Being in the car with people who were talking casually about art seemed surreal to her. Her life had been threatened, and yet here they were, talking about Samantha’s watercolors and Paloma’s jewelry. How could they? Why weren’t they all discussing how she might protect herself, how she might escape from this horrible nightmare that was holding her in its grip, how she might live to see Monday?

  Maybe they thought she didn’t want to talk about it. She certainly hadn’t been all that talkative back in the room. But that had been because she hadn’t been sure they’d take her seriously. They didn’t seem to be grasping the truth. One person had died, another had been seriously injured and was still unconscious, and more important, someone had connected those events to her.

  She had no idea why. She hadn’t known Ted that well, or Milo, either. And no one knew she’d had the dreams.

  How could she blame her friends for not grasping what was going on? They hadn’t seen what she’d seen in the paintings, and they hadn’t had the nightmares.

  But what did they think was going on? Did they really believe that Ted’s death and Milo’s fall had been accidental, that her entrapment in the storage closet had been a fluke of some kind?

  Joseph and Samantha were still discussing art when Aidan took a corner too fast. The shoebox on Paloma’s lap slipped off her knees and slid to the floor, the lid flopping off as it landed. Jewelry spilled out across Paloma’s black, high-button shoes.

  Rachel bent to help pile the pieces back inside their container.

  When she saw the bracelet, she thought at first that she was imagining it. She closed her eyes, shook her head to clear her vision, but when she opened her eyes again, the bracelet was still lying in the palm of her hand, and there was no mistaking its design.

  It was a simple gold chain from which dangled half a dozen tiny brass monkeys.

  Rachel looked at it more closely. Two of the monkeys had their tiny paws over their mouths. Two were covering their eyes, and two more were shielding their ears from sound. The first one was identical to the monkey she had found lying on her pillow.

  “Paloma?” Rachel said softly. “Did you make this bracelet?”

  Paloma, busy scooping jewelry off the floor of the car and back into its shoebox, glanced up to see which piece Rachel was asking her about. She nodded. “Yeah, I did. Like it?”

  “The ‘see-no-evil’ bracelet?” Samantha asked from the front seat. She turned her head toward Rachel. “I have one. I liked Paloma’s so much, I had her make one for me.”

  “I already have the monkeys made,” Paloma said to Rachel. “I made a bunch of them at the same time. So putting a bracelet together for you wouldn’t take any time at all. In fact, I keep them in that storage closet you were stuck in. If you’d snooped around at all, you’d have come across them.”

  The expression “stuck in” wasn’t lost on Rachel. Paloma hadn’t said “locked in” or “trapped in,” she’d said “stuck in,” as if the door had accidentally, innocently, jammed. As if being trapped there and having to make a dangerous escape by dumbwaiter could have happened to anyone, anytime.

  But Rachel was too preoccupied with the shock of seeing the tiny brass monkeys to focus on Paloma’s choice of expression. Unwilling to release the bracelet, Rachel stared down at it, still in the palm of her hand. Paloma and Samantha both owned bracelets like this one? “Have you made more bracelets like this one?”

  “Sure.” Paloma covered the shoebox. “Half a dozen or so. Why?”

  In a way, Rachel was relieved. When she had first seen the bracelet, her instant reaction had been to suspect Paloma. But if Samantha and half a dozen other people on campus owned similar bracelets, any one of them could have put that monkey on Rachel’s pillow as a warning.

  And Paloma had said she kept more of the tiny monkeys in the storage closet. “Do you keep them locked in something?” Rachel asked. “Like a strong box, something with a key?”

  Paloma reached up to adjust her black velvet choker. “Locked up? The monkeys? No. Why would I lock them up? They’re just brass, Rachel. They’re not all that valuable.”

  That meant that everyone in the art department had access to the charms. Great. The art department had a lot of people in it.

  At the mall, while Paloma talked with the jewelry shop manager, Aidan dragged everyone else into a nearby shop
called African Safari. It was filled with exotic clothing and accessories, live plants, books, and photographs. On the wall near the door hung a cluster of masks carved of dark wood, the reason for Aidan’s enthusiasm.

  The masks were unlike anything Aidan made. The wood was smooth and shiny, the features painted on in vivid colors. Some had hair, some heavy wooden earrings dangling from lobes.

  Aidan stretched up his arm to lift two of the more exotic masks off the wall. Holding one up in front of his own face, he thrust the other toward Rachel. “Here, try it on for size. It’ll give me some idea of the dimensions I’ll need when I make your life mask.”

  At the words “life mask,” Rachel went deathly white and backed away from Aidan so fast, she stumbled and nearly fell over a display of baskets behind her on the floor.

  “Rachel, what’s wrong?” Samantha asked.

  And Aidan, still extending the wooden mask, echoed, “Rachel? These things don’t bite. Go ahead, try it on!”

  Rachel shook her head. “I … I … let Sam try it on.”

  “I don’t want Sam to try it on,” Aidan said sharply from behind his own mask. “I want you to. Come on, be a sport.”

  But Rachel was still backing away, moving toward the door. “I don’t feel very good,” she said. “I need some air. I’ll meet you outside by the front entrance.”

  “There’s a terrace right around the corner,” Joseph said.

  But Rachel was already gone.

  She ran blindly through the mall, not thinking about where she was going, just wanting to go anywhere, to get away from the endless horror she’d been facing the past few days.

  Finally, she reached the big glass doors of the mall and hurried through them.

  Off to one side, she spotted a bench and went to sit down and catch her breath. The bench was directly beneath the terrace Joseph had mentioned.

  Above her, Rachel could see red flower blossoms peeking out from underneath the metal railing. It was probably very pretty up there, but she felt much safer down here, with all these people hurrying past.

  Joseph had told them they were supposed to be back at the art building by six o’clock and she glanced at her wristwatch to check the time. Only four-thirty. Plenty of time.

  Still, she hoped the others wouldn’t spend all afternoon in the mall. She was safe enough out here, sitting on a bench watching shoppers pass by with their trophies, but it didn’t strike her as a really fun way to spend a day.

  Aidan was probably mad at her for refusing to try on the masks. Was that why he hadn’t come with her?

  Something moved above her, and Rachel glanced up.

  What she saw was the huge pot of bright red blossoms.

  It was no longer sitting under the metal railing.

  With a stab of terror she realized that the heavy pot of flowers had fallen off the edge of the stone terrace above her and was descending, at an astonishingly rapid speed, straight for her.

  Chapter 14

  RACHEL SAT FROZEN ON the stone bench, her head tilted, disbelieving eyes riveted on the heavy pot plunging down upon her. If a shopper emerging from the mall just then hadn’t seen what was happening and screamed a shrill warning, the pot would have slammed into Rachel full force.

  The scream yanked her back to awareness. She catapulted her body backward, as hard as she could, off the bench and onto the grass. She landed on her back, one foot not yet free of the stone bench. The huge, heavy, terra-cotta pot slammed into the bench, instantly exploding into chunks of clay and sprays of dirt and red blossoms. There were screams and shouts as razor-sharp pot shards imbedded themselves in a forearm carrying a shopping bag, a hand counting change for the bus, the neck of the woman who had screamed a warning to Rachel. A toddler screamed in rage as a clod of dark dirt splashed his face and eyes. Another small child recoiled in terror, hiding his face in his mother’s coat, while a group of teenagers lounging far enough away to escape injury watched with barely concealed delight at this unexpected relief from their chronic boredom.

  Pandemonium reigned under the mall canopy.

  Rachel didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her left foot was pinned against the stone bench by a large chunk of pot, dirt and flowers. It hurt. She could see a thin stream of blood dripping from the bench. Her blood. But she knew she was lucky to be alive. If that woman hadn’t screamed …

  Rachel swallowed a belated scream of her own. Then, because there was absolutely nothing she could do to help anyone, she lay back down on the grass and waited, her eyes wide open, staring up at the cloudless blue sky overhead. It was a pretty day, picture-perfect. And it had almost been the last day of Rachel Seaver’s short life.

  She closed her eyes.

  And opened them again when she heard Aidan’s voice above her saying, “I knew you should have stayed with us! Are you okay?” And then, “Rachel, you’re bleeding. Your foot …”

  “I know,” she said calmly, looking up at him. “The pot fell. I was sitting on that bench when it came crashing down from the terrace. Just a second ago, I was sitting on that very bench.”

  Although she spoke calmly, Aidan got the picture. As Samantha and Paloma arrived, breathless with shock, Aidan began scooping the mound of debris off Rachel’s foot. When it was completely uncovered, he carefully wrapped his windbreaker around the injured foot, bleeding steadily from a deep cut just above the anklebone. Then he knelt by Rachel’s side, awaiting the ambulance.

  Security officers busied themselves helping the injured, consoling the frightened children, asking questions.

  Rachel had turned her head toward the entrance. Even in her shock, she couldn’t help being amused by the change in expression on shoppers’ faces as they emerged from the mall. They came out laughing or chattering with friends, or they came out alone, lost in thought, but no matter what they were doing when they came through the glass doors, their faces transformed completely when the scene of havoc before them registered.

  Paloma and Samantha had been laughing too when they came out of the mall, laughter that died an abrupt death when they saw the chaos. Rachel was surprised to see Bibi and Rudy Samms trailing along behind them. Samantha dropped her packages and rushed over to the grassy area.

  “Where did Bibi and Rudy come from?” Rachel murmured. “I thought they were still at the art building.”

  Aidan shrugged. “Who knows? Everyone left African Safari right after you did. They all had other places they wanted to go, so we said we’d all meet out here. They must have run into Bibi and Rudy inside.”

  By now, Rachel was surrounded by a small crowd. And the buzz of conversation around her made it clear that everyone was assuming the pot had simply fallen off the terrace.

  All by itself? Rachel thought, disgusted. A great big pot like that? Oh, right. Like it was dancing or doing calisthenics and missed a step and tumbled right over the edge? So careless of it.

  And people thought she was imagining things.

  How could anyone possibly think that huge, heavy pot had somehow, all by itself and accidentally, fallen from the terrace?

  Someone had pushed it. She knew it, in her heart and in her head. And toppling something that heavy must have taken strong muscles and a ton of determination.

  But she was told, a few minutes later by the mall security officers, that no one had been on the terrace before the pot fell.

  “It didn’t just fall,” Rachel insisted as the ambulance arrived with a mournful wail of its siren. “It couldn’t have. Someone pushed it.” Hadn’t she said the same thing about Milo? No one had believed her then, either.

  Milo … he was the reason Rachel changed her mind about refusing to go to the hospital. She had hoped to be taken to the campus infirmary for a quick dressing of her ankle wound, and then straight to her room and to bed.

  But … if she went to the hospital, as the ambulance attendants were insisting, maybe she could hunt Milo down and, if he was finally conscious, ask him about the fire escape incident. If Milo remembered being pushed,
she’d have someone backing her up. That would certainly help, wouldn’t it? Then when she took the calendar page to security, she could tell them to go talk to Milo and they’d know the danger was real. Very real.

  To her surprise, Aidan made it clear that he and the others didn’t believe the incident had been accidental. And he said so, first to Rachel, then to the mall security personnel.

  Listening to Aidan and the officer argue, Rachel found herself much more interested in how long Rudy Samms had been with Bibi. Was he with her when the pot had come crashing down? Because if he wasn’t, he just might have been out on the terrace, giving the huge planter a wicked nudge.

  She knew she found it easier to suspect Rudy because she didn’t like him as much as she did the others. Maybe that was unfair, but she couldn’t help it.

  “She got this message,” Aidan was saying to the security officer as Rachel was loaded onto a stretcher. “Threatening her. Saying she wouldn’t live to see tomorrow. That’s why we’re pretty sure the pot didn’t just fall all by itself. Has one ever fallen before?”

  “Not since I came to work here.”

  “Enough said,” Aidan said firmly. He told Rachel they’d meet her at the hospital.

  “No, Aidan,” she said quickly, “you don’t have to.” If they all came to the hospital and waited for her to be treated, she’d never get to track down Milo. They’d insist on whisking her off to her room and tucking her into bed, safe and sound. “I could be there a long time. You know what emergency rooms are like. And I know you guys are supposed to be back at the art building by six. You go ahead. When they’ve fixed me up I’ll call you there. Someone can come down and pick me up then, okay?”

  Not long afterward, she came out of the emergency room with stitches and a thick bandage on her injured ankle.