by Diane Hoh
He’d be in a hurry now to fulfill his mission. She had, for just that one second when she’d kicked out at the pitcher, taken away his power. How he must have hated that! He must need more than ever to create the image in the watercolor, to get that feeling of power and control again.
She would have to be fast, so fast …
If only she could remove the pads from her eyes.
But not yet … not yet … he mustn’t know her hands were free.
Her ears ached with the strain of such intense listening. Just a few more minutes …
Footsteps … approaching her table … the sloshing of the mixed plaster …
“Now, you lie perfectly still,” he said, his voice icy, “or I’m going to kill you right here and now and do your mask afterward.”
She waited just a fraction of a second and then brought her hand out from behind her and slashed out blindly with the razor-sharp X-Acto knife.
A scream of pain and rage told her she’d connected.
Still holding the knife, Rachel threw herself sideways, off the table and onto the floor. As she fell, the pads over her eyes slid sideways and then, as she jumped to her feet, dropped to the floor.
She could see.
And the person standing before her, staring in disbelief at the gashed, bleeding arm held up, dripping red on the tile floor, wasn’t Aidan McKay, not Joseph Milano, not even Rudy Samms.
It was Samantha Widdoes.
They stared at each other, Rachel’s eyes stunned, Samantha’s hot with rage.
“You?” Rachel managed. “How? I don’t understand. Why?”
Samantha grabbed a smock from the table behind her and wrapped it around her wounded arm. Her mouth twisted as she sneered, “You don’t know what it was like! No one appreciated my work! They all said it was weak. ‘Wishy-washy pastels,’ Joseph called them. But I can’t work in oils. You heard them at the exhibit. Everyone hated that seascape. They all said my paintings were weak.”
“Sam …”
“Well, I showed them, didn’t I?” Samantha’s perfect cheekbones were an angry scarlet. “Weak? Weak? When I can paint something and then make it happen! They can’t do that, none of them. I’m the only one who can. I’m the one with all the power.”
Rachel’s mind raced. She had to get out of this room. But Sam was standing between her and the door. And she was so full of rage and hate, that even with a wounded arm, Rachel would be no match for her. “But Sam,” she said softly, “no one knows you’ve got that power, so what good does it do you? You didn’t sign the paintings, and I was the only one who saw the hidden images. You should tell everyone. You should share your power, so they’ll know.”
A crafty smile lit Samantha’s face. “Oh, no. I thought that, too, at first. But that would spoil everything. I’d have to stop then, and I don’t want to. Not for a long, long time. It’s enough for me that I know. That’s why I have to kill you, Rachel, because you saw the images. I thought I hid them so cleverly.” She tilted her head at Rachel, the expression on her face one of simple curiosity. “Why was it only you who saw them? You don’t know anything about art.”
“Maybe that’s why.” Rachel reached out slowly, easily, to place both hands on the edge of the table. She knew it was on wheels, because it had moved slightly beneath her when she was trying to wrestle the knife from her pocket. “I wasn’t judging your work artistically, like the others were. I was just looking at the painting to see what was in it.”
“And you found it,” Sam said, a trace of regret in her voice. “Well, that’s too bad, Rachel. I like you. I think we could have been friends. But I have no choice now. You can see that, can’t you?” Her voice hardened, “I’m not giving up my power.”
“But …” Rachel said, desperately trying to stall for time. “How did you start your … creating?”
“It was an accident in the beginning,” Samantha said.
Rachel’s grip on the table tightened.
“I had this vision of someone standing on the riverbank fishing, of someone pushing him over the edge toward the waterfall, and so I sketched it. The drawing was so much more exciting than stupid, pale flowers. Joseph would have loved it.”
Rachel apologized silently to Joseph. The sketches hadn’t been his, but Samantha’s.
“Then I painted the image into the seascape, so cleverly that no one would notice. And later I took the baseball bat and went looking for someone fishing. I knew there’d be someone there, and I didn’t care who it was. I didn’t even know Ted Leonides. When I’d done what the vision told me to do, I felt so strong, so powerful, Rachel. It was wonderful! And,” Samantha shrugged, “I knew I’d get another vision. And I did.” She laughed, a thin shrill sound. “That’s why Milo’s in the hospital.” She looked at Rachel again, her eyes bright. “You knew Milo had been pushed, didn’t you? How did you know he hadn’t just fallen?”
“It’s a gift,” Rachel said flatly, unwilling to share “visions” with this cold-blooded, power-hungry maniac.
“They said my work was weak,” Samantha said almost absentmindedly, as if she were talking to herself. “Weak! Which meant that I was.” To Rachel, she said slyly, “But I’m not, am I, Rachel? You’d testify to that if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Rachel said calmly. “I’d testify that you are a weak, sneaky little coward.”
Samantha’s cheeks flamed, and her eyes turned dark with fury. “Get back on the table,” she commanded in a completely different voice, this one hard and cold. She seemed unaware that Rachel’s hands had a firm grip on the table’s edge. “You’re not going to ruin this for me.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, “I am.” And with one strong, desperate push, she shoved the table forward, pinning a startled Samantha between it and the smaller table behind her.
With a roar of rage, Sam lunged forward to push herself free. But the floor beneath her was still wet and slippery from the spilled liquid plaster. She slipped, slid, her feet went out from under her, and with a look of total surprise on her face, she slammed to the floor. There was a sudden, sickening crack as the back of her skull hit the hard tile. Then silence.
Shaking violently, Rachel stayed where she was for several seconds, expecting Samantha at any second to jump to her feet and attack.
But nothing happened.
Slowly, tentatively, Rachel moved around the edge of the table to look down.
Samantha lay on the floor, her eyes closed. Her face was free of rage now, and seemed peaceful and sweet. Innocent. Even … even gentle. The real Samantha, the cruel, power-mad Samantha, was hiding now, like the images in her gentle, innocent watercolors.
But she had been unmasked. And no amount of plaster in the world could hide who she really was.
Rachel glanced up at the big, round clock high on the wall.
Twelve-ten.
Monday.
It was Monday.
And she was alive.
Rachel stepped around Samantha and left the room.
Epilogue
THEY STOOD IN THE art building lobby, watching as Samantha was taken away on a stretcher. Aidan had an arm around Rachel, who was pale but steady on her feet, and Rudy and Bibi, visibly shaken, were holding hands.
“She picked Milo almost at random,” Rachel said. “The night of the party, she must have scouted the house, checked out the rooms and picked his because it was right on the fire escape. So she could fulfill the image she’d hidden in the watercolor.”
Rachel knew that none of her friends were grasping what had happened. They had known Samantha longer than they had known Rachel, and had had no inkling of Samantha’s hidden rage about her work. They were all in shock.
There would be plenty of time later to fill them in, explain that Sam had locked her in the closet, left the charm on her pillow, pushed the heavy pot off the terrace, sent the calendar page, tried to kill her because Rachel alone saw the hidden images in the paintings.
They would believe it now. They wouldn
’t understand about her dreams and her ability to see in Samantha’s paintings what no one else had, but that didn’t matter. Not really.
She was certain of one thing. Now that she had stopped the fulfillment of the worst nightmare of all—her own murder—she would have no more dreams. She felt it in her head and in her heart. They were finished.
The lobby should have seemed barren and cold, with all of the paintings off the walls in preparation for a new exhibit. But to Rachel, it seemed, for the first time since she’d seen the seascape hanging on the far wall, warm and welcoming.
She would come back here again.
She might even come back in the morning.
Monday seemed like a good day to begin learning about art.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Nightmare Hall Series
Prologue
WE WERE ALL SO very sorry.
If only we could have changed what happened. In a second, in a minute, in a heartbeat, we’d go back to that blustery night in late March and correct our horrible mistake. Then everything would be the way it was before.
Before the fire.
Because afterward, nothing would ever be the same again.
All it takes is one careless accident that sets the wheels in motion. In one fleeting moment everything is changed. Forever. And you don’t even know it’s happening. You’re laughing and talking and goofing around, and you don’t even realize until it’s too late.
When you do see what’s happened, you wish and you hope and you pray to go back, just for that one moment, to do something differently, to erase the horror that came after. You actually kid yourself that it might be possible. But, of course, it isn’t.
We thought we could learn to live with our mistake.
How could we know that someone didn’t want us living with it?
How could we know that someone didn’t want us living at all?
Being sorry wasn’t enough.
Someone wanted more, much more.
Someone wanted us dead.
Chapter 1
IT WAS BAY’S IDEA to celebrate Salem University’s hard-won battle against State in the semifinals by going to the state park not far from campus. That’s my Bayard Shaw, tall, with short, butterscotch-colored hair, friendly blue eyes, and a lazy smile. Bay Shaw liked golden retrievers, seedless grapes, water sports, getting elected to things, and me, Victory Austin Alexander. That’s Victory, not Victoria, although teachers have been changing it for me my whole life, thinking, apparently, that I wasn’t capable of spelling my own name correctly. When I met Bay, early in our first semester at Salem and told him my name (because he asked), he laughed.
I was used to that. And now that I was a college freshman, I’d decided to tell the truth about where my name came from. “My parents tried for twelve years to have a child. I’m their success story. Born, at long last, in Austin, Texas. Thus the name. I’m just glad they settled on Victory rather than Triumph or Hallelujah. Or worse.”
Bay was a powerhouse on campus. He was very big in student government, unusual for a first-year student, and so popular, you only had to say his name and everyone knew who you meant. And that wasn’t because he was the only student named “Bay” on campus. It was because he was very good at meeting people, getting to know them, and making sure they knew him. Bay was headed for politics after graduation, and campus was his training ground.
People listened when Bayard Shaw talked.
I, on the other hand, was a lot less noticeable. Not very tall, for one thing, and I talked too quietly, or so my mother said. “You’d better learn to speak up, Tory,” she had said at least a thousand times, “or no one will notice you.”
My response to that was always, “Thanks for sharing that, Mom.” But I knew she was right. I wasn’t beautiful, like Mindy Loomis, a cheerleader and Hoop Sinclair’s steady date. Mindy had skin as smooth as silk, and perfect blonde hair. I’d heard it said that Mindy had the brains of a beach umbrella, but that’s not true. It’s just that Mindy’s mother, one of those genteel southern ladies with tons of hair and perfectly applied makeup, taught Mindy never to argue with people because then they wouldn’t like her. So everyone thought Mindy had no opinions about anything. Not true. She just kept them to herself. Anyway, she cried at sad movies, so I liked her.
And I’d never been the life of the party like Hoop, who attended every party held on campus even if it was on a weeknight when Coach wanted him in bed early. Hoop came to class most mornings with bags the size of small mountains under his eyes. For someone who was supposed to be a top athlete, he wasn’t taking very good care of himself. I kept expecting Coach to throw him off the team, but it didn’t happen. Hoop Sinclair was too valuable.
I wasn’t tall, which would have got me attention, or model-thin like Natasha Moody, my roommate and best friend on campus. Nat’s waist was so small, she could belt her jeans and skirts with a rubber band. Nat would never do that, of course, because she was a fashion plate who put more thought into her accessories than many generals put into planning the most strategic battle of the war.
So I wasn’t beautiful and I wasn’t the life of the party, and I wasn’t tall and skinny. I also didn’t have Eli Segal’s brains or creativity. Before we left campus for Christmas break, Eli, someone I’d always thought of as shy and quiet, dressed the statue of Salem’s founder that stands in the middle of the Commons in a Santa suit. The administration was not amused.
But I was. And I viewed Eli with new respect after that.
What my mother never understood when she was nagging me about “speaking up” was, I didn’t need a whole lot of attention. Not like Bay, and Mindy, and Hoop. And even Nat, otherwise why would she take such pains with her clothing and hair and makeup? Eli, too, or he wouldn’t have gone into the town of Twin Falls and rented that Santa suit. So, I guess, out of our group, I needed the least attention of all.
Which made it really hard for me when the media latched onto our story like leeches in a swamp. None of us liked it. That’s not the kind of attention anyone wants. But I hated it most of all. And there was nothing I could do about it.
I remember wishing a thousand times that I were stupid, so that I could have honestly said, when asked about that night in the park, “I didn’t know any better.” But just as I knew I wasn’t beautiful or terribly creative or charming or noticeable, I also knew I wasn’t stupid. So I had no excuse for my part in what happened.
What we were celebrating that night in March was our school’s triumph over State University in the basketball semifinals. We’d be going on to the finals, thanks in part to Hoop’s genius on the court. He was still beaming when he met us outside the gym, and his wide, square face was still flushed, his thick blond hair damp from his shower and curling around his jumbo-sized ears.
When Bay said, “I think we should grab some hot dogs and head for the state park to celebrate,” it was Eli who said, “No cooking at the park tonight, the wind’s too high. No burning allowed. There are posters all over campus.”
I wish it had been me, Tory Alexander, who had said that. I’d love to claim that it was, sort of let myself off the hook a little, but I’d be lying. It was Eli. Only Eli, although all of us had seen the posters around campus warning us, in big, black letters, of the fire hazard in the area.
Then I was glad I hadn’t said it, because Bay’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline and he said in that deceptively friendly voice that I’d heard before when he was annoyed with someone, “Appreciate the input, Segal. But all we’re going to do is fricassee a few hot dogs. How dangerous can that be? I’ve been doing it for years. Haven’t set a forest on fire once.”
I myself would have preferred to go into town and do some dancing at Johnny’s or gone to Vinnie’s for pizza. Half the school would be at Vinnie’s.
So why didn’t I say so? Well, for one thing, I didn’t want Bay looking at me the way he was looking at Eli, and for another, I knew I was no match for Bay. He had this amazing talen
t for persuading people not only to do what he wanted, but to convince them that it was what they wanted, too. I was smart enough to see that, but not smart enough to figure out whether it was charm or manipulation. Whatever it was, it worked, and I was convinced that Bay would make a great politician some day.
If Bay wanted to go to the park and cook hot dogs, that was what we’d do. We all knew that.
So we were surprised when Eli didn’t give in right away. Eli was quiet, like me. I’d heard him argue before, but always about abstract things, like philosophy and psychology and politics. He could get very passionate about those things. But I’d never heard him disagree with anyone before on a personal matter.
Eli said, “We can’t go to the park, Bay. It’ll be cold without a campfire, and no fun. But we can’t have one. The winter’s been too dry and the wind has been fierce for a week. It still is. Building a fire in the park is just too risky.”
He was right about the wind. My hair, which according to my mother I wear “too long for such a small face,” was practically being yanked out of my scalp by the late-March, very brisk wind that Eli was talking about. Unlike Mindy’s hair, which still looked as smooth and perfect as it had when she’d run out onto the court in her cheerleading uniform three hours earlier. How was that possible? Maybe she sprayed it with shellac.
“Eli,” Bay said smoothly, “if you’re worried about the fire getting out of hand, we’ll grab a couple of big bottles of water when we get the hot dogs, okay? We’ll keep an eagle eye on things and if so much as a spark gets away from us, I promise I’ll hunt it down myself and douse it. Don’t you trust me?”
Eli hesitated. He did trust Bay. We all did. Bay had great ideas and great follow-through and never messed up. “If we get caught by the park rangers, Bay,” Eli pointed out, “we’re doomed.”
