House of Reckoning

  “Fine,” she said, but the way she kept her eyes down told him she wasn’t telling the truth.

  “You don’t look fine,” he said, then realizing how that sounded, felt his face burning and tried to find better words. “I mean, you look great—really pretty, but—” He reached for her backpack. “Let me carry that, okay?”

  Sarah stopped long enough to let him slip it off her shoulders. “I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “What happened?” Nick pressed.

  Sarah hesitated, then offered Nick a careless shrug that he didn’t believe any more than he’d believed her words when she told him she was fine. “They made me sleep outside,” she finally admitted.

  Nick stopped short, staring at her. “They made you sleep outside? Why?”

  Instead of answering his question, Sarah pulled the collar of her coat tighter and started down the street. “We have to hurry or we’ll be late.”

  “It’s November! They can’t make you sleep outside.” Nick tugged on the shoulder of her coat until she stopped walking. “You should tell someone. Don’t you have, like, a social worker or something?”

  “No!” Sarah looked up at him with such fear that Nick took a step backward. “If I tell anyone, the Garveys won’t let me go see my father.”

  “How can they do that? I mean, he’s your father! Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  Sarah kept walking, but finally began telling Nick what had happened yesterday, starting with going to church, then recounting everything right up to coming home and finding the note on the sleeping bag.

  They were just across the street from the school when she abruptly stopped walking. “There was one more thing, too,” she went on. “I drew this weird picture up at Miss Philips’s house. It showed this dark room filled with skeletons.” Nick felt a tingle at the back of his neck, and on the edge of his consciousness he thought he could hear the voices whispering among themselves. “It was like I was possessed or something,” Sarah finished, her voice dropping to a whisper so low he could barely hear it.

  “Like I feel,” he said softly. “Only I feel like that most of the time.” As they started across the street, Nick finally told her what had happened to him last night. “It was really awful—I mean, I think my dad wants to send me back to the hospital.”

  “What were they about?” Sarah asked, stopping at the foot of the steps leading to the school’s front doors. “I mean, the stuff you saw. What was it?”

  Now it was Nick who shrugged, but the voices in his head were murmuring a little louder. “Just weird stuff—really thick black bars …” He groped for a better word. “Like huge beams or something, you know? Like—”

  “What time was it?” Sarah cut in.

  Now the voices were getting louder, but they weren’t shouting at him, and they weren’t screaming or howling in fury or pain. It seemed they wanted him to tell her about them. “It started while we were eating dinner,” Nick said. “Then I went upstairs, hoping my dad wouldn’t see how bad it was, but I guess I started throwing things or something, and they finally came up and gave me a shot.”

  “What time?” Sarah pressed. “I mean, what time did they give you the shot?”

  “About eight, I guess. But I don’t really know.”

  “That’s about when I left Miss Philips’s house,” Sarah said. “And the room I drew while you were seeing something has really heavy rafters on the ceiling.”

  The voices sounded even more excited now, and suddenly in the periphery of his vision Nick caught a glimpse of something. A skull?

  But it was gone as quickly as it had come, and he couldn’t be sure. “I don’t remember exactly—it was really dark, and the voices were screaming like they were people being tortured or killed or—” He shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.” He moved up the steps and pulled open the heavy door just as the bell rang. “You want to meet up after school?”

  Sarah hesitated only a second, but that second seemed to Nick to go on and on. Then she nodded. “Sure.”

  By the time Nick slid into his seat in his first class—a moment too late to escape a glare from his teacher—he had decided on two things.

  For the first time in his life, he would struggle to remember the hallucination he’d had, instead of trying to forget it.

  And second, no one—not the Garveys or anyone else—would ever treat Sarah Crane as she’d been treated last night.

  Never.

  Conner West gazed dolefully down at the big red F on the corner of his English test, then wadded it up and tossed it expertly into the trash can that stood fifteen feet down the hall from his locker. If English were basketball, he’d ace the tests every time. As it was, the only way he could keep from flunking the course was to write a book report tonight for a few extra credit points. Or he could do a class presentation on one of the authors they were studying, but even Mrs. Roselle knew he wasn’t going to do that. So it was the book report or nothing, and he couldn’t just chuck his quarterly report card into the trash like he had the test.

  Crap.

  Now he’d have to eat lunch fast and spend half the hour on one of the computers in the library trying to find CliffsNotes on the Internet for one of the books on the list Mrs. Roselle had handed him. Not that using the Cliff Notes was cheating—even old Mrs. Roselle knew he wasn’t going to actually read the book.

  “But you will do the writing, Conner,” she’d told him when she held him after class a few minutes ago. “And don’t think you can just copy and paste something—I’ve seen them all, and I have a program that will find anything new and compare your work to it. Even a little decent paraphrasing will do you enough good to get you a D. Okay?”

  What was he supposed to say? If he didn’t pass English, he might not graduate.

  Even worse, his dad would take away his car keys.

  “Mac and cheese for lunch again,” Bobby Fendler said as he opened the locker next to Conner’s.

  “Swell!” Conner said, slamming his locker door and spinning the dial on the lock. “Just freakin’ swell! If it’s like yesterday’s, I’ll hurl in study hall.”

  “Hey, Conner,” a voice he recognized as Tiffany Garvey’s said from behind him. Suddenly things were looking up.

  And things were looking even better when he turned around, saw the look in Tiffany’s eyes, and remembered the pills she’d been selling last week. If she had more—

  “Want to take me to McDonald’s?” Tiffany asked, twirling a lock of her blond hair around a finger and running her tongue over her lower lip in a way that drove any thoughts of spending part of the next hour in the library out of his mind.

  “Sure,” he said. But even as he spoke, he remembered the condition of his wallet and glanced at Bobby Fendler. Bobby always had plenty of cash. “Want to go along?”

  “Beats mac and cheese.” Bobby was about to toss his backpack into his locker, but then eyed Tiffany speculatively. “We comin’ back?”

  Tiffany shrugged. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you buy,” she replied. She glanced around to see who might be listening, then patted her own backpack. “You guys buy what I’m selling, and I’m going shopping after lunch.”

  Grabbing Elliot Nash on their way to the parking lot, Tiffany slid into the front seat next to Conner while the other two boys piled into the backseat. Conner floored the accelerator as he turned out of the parking lot, laying a strip of rubber that would take at least a thousand miles off the rear tires.

  Ten minutes later they’d shouted their orders into the little speaker and waited for the carhop to bring their food.

  “So,” Tiffany said, leaning back against the passenger door of Conner’s car and getting right to the point. “I’ve got more of those little blue jobbies.”

  “How much?” Conner asked.

  “Ten bucks each,” Tiffany said.

  “Ten bucks?” Elliot Nash complained. “Oh, man, I don’t have any money.” br />
  “Bobby does,” Conner said, and glanced at Bobby in the rearview mirror. “Loan me twenty bucks, dude?”

  “You haven’t paid me the last twenty I loaned you.”

  “I will,” Conner said. “I’ve got money at home. I’ll pay this afternoon.”

  “Liar,” Bobby grumbled, but still fished out his wallet and handed Conner a twenty.

  “Can I borrow ten?” Elliot pleaded. “Please.”

  “This is why I stock the shelves at Wal-Mart?” Bobby demanded, but handed Elliot the ten. “But you guys are going to pay me back this time,” he added. “Both of you.” His eyes bored into Conner West’s reflection in the mirror, but Conner only shrugged.

  “Didn’t I just tell you I would?”

  Tiffany took the money from Bobby Fendler, tucked it deep into her backpack, then doled out four blue capsules, two for Conner and one for each of the boys in the backseat.

  The food arrived, but suddenly Conner wasn’t hungry anymore—the pills in his hand were already talking to him. Tiffany seemed to read his mind.

  “Don’t even think about taking that until after you drop me at the mall out by the prison,” Tiffany said.

  “Whatcha going to do after the mall?” Conner asked.

  Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Nothing with you—you’ll be so stoned you won’t even be able to get in trouble.”

  Conner grinned, and dropped the pills into his shirt pocket. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to get in any trouble with Tiffany Garvey, but so what? Who needed Tiffany?

  There were plenty of other ways to make trouble.

  Sarah sat at her art table and eyed the still life Miss Philips had arranged on the table: a crystal ball, fruit, a silver teapot, and a black-and-white china teacup edged in silver on a matching saucer, all laid out on a checkered cloth, the monochromatic pattern reflected in the mirrorlike polish of the teapot. A spotlight that Bettina Philips had set up to the right of the arrangement cast shadows and reflections everywhere, making the exercise one in executing light and shadow as well as portraying the still life itself.

  Sarah decided she’d start by sketching the crystal ball, since it was totally in the foreground as everything else was slightly hidden behind it, but her fingers refused to pick up the charcoal pencil. Instead they hovered over the oil pastels, and without thinking about it, she picked up the medium brown.

  With broad strokes, she centered the tabletop two-thirds down from the top of the page, but as she looked at the paper, she realized the light didn’t come from the side as Miss Philips had indicated; it came from the big windows to the south, behind the man—

  Wait a minute.

  What man?

  And what windows?

  She looked up, and the still life was exactly as it had been a moment ago.

  Nothing had changed at all.

  But when she looked back at the paper—

  It was as if there was an image inside the paper itself, trapped beneath its surface, struggling to get out.

  Or trapped in her own mind, projecting itself onto the paper, demanding that she give it form and expose it to the light.

  No longer thinking about what she was doing, Sarah let her hand move as if by its own volition, losing herself in the strange world she was creating.

  Except she wasn’t creating it—it was real; it existed somewhere, or had existed, or would exist, or—

  Her hand moved faster, picking up one color after another, filling the paper with shapes and colors in bold, sure strokes, the classroom around her fading from her consciousness as her mind focused solely on the image that was quickly taking shape on the paper.

  In his math classroom on the second floor, Nick Dunnigan’s knuckles turned white as his fingers clamped the edges of his desk while he tried to keep the pain in his head at bay. But it wasn’t working.

  And this afternoon it wasn’t just the voices raging at him, but something else as well.

  A dog!

  A dog that was howling in either fury or in agony or both. And one of the voices was growing, rising above the rest, erupting with a hideous laughter that slashed through Nick’s mind like a ripsaw.

  As the screeching laughter built and the dog’s howling grew along with it, Nick saw a flicker of motion at the periphery of his vision and felt his guts twist in fear at what might come next. A second later it was there—a huge yellow dog, leaping toward him out of a strange blackness, its mouth gaping, its fangs dripping with saliva, its fury still boiling from its throat.

  As the howling grew and the maniacal laughter reached a crescendo, the throbbing in Nick’s head threatened to explode his skull, and the yellow mass that was the dog exploded into a blaze of crimson that wiped everything else from his sight.

  Whimpering against the hell into which he was quickly descending, Nick Dunnigan offered up a silent prayer of deliverance.

  Deliverance for himself, and for the howling dog as well, for now, as his vision began to fade, the fury in the dog’s fading howl drained away into nothing more than a dying gurgle.

  Sarah’s head snapped up as Bettina Philips rose from the chair behind her desk and clapped her hands twice. “All right, we only have a few minutes left, so let’s start cleaning up our tables and putting things away.”

  Sarah’s eyes shifted from the teacher to the clock on the wall—was it possible the class was almost over? But it couldn’t be—she’d only been working for a few minutes! Yet there it was: in four more minutes the final bell of the day would ring.

  Then her gaze shifted again, to the sheet of paper spread out on the table in front of her.

  No, she thought. I couldn’t have drawn this—I couldn’t!

  Silence dropped over Nick like a shroud, wiping away the hallucinations as completely as it cut off the voices in his head. Yet even with his eyes closed, he could still see the image of the dying dog, etched into his memory forever. He tried to close it out, banish it as he was banishing the tension that had strained every muscle in his body. He sat unmoving, his spine ramrod straight, his eyes focused on a spot directly ahead. He could feel his classmates looking at him and starting to whisper among themselves, but he didn’t care. All he wanted was one thing.

  He wanted to see Sarah Crane.

  He needed to see her.

  Sarah stared at the drawing in front of her, the shock of what she had done hitting her with the force of a baseball bat.

  Barely able to breathe, her eyes fixed on the sepia-brown image of a screaming man, his arm in the jaws of a pain-crazed dog whose intestines had exploded from its belly and were spilled across a table in a swath of crimson-tinged gore. In his hand, the man held a scalpel still dripping with blood and glinting in the sunlight refracted from the tall windows behind him.

  A terrible numbness began to spread through her. How could she have done this? And worse, what would Bettina Philips think when she saw it? Quickly folding the drawing in half before anyone else could get even a glimpse of it, she thought quickly.

  “Any questions?” Miss Philips asked the class.

  The bell rang and everybody stood up, eager to get out of the building for the day.

  “Put your drawings on my desk,” she said over the growing din of the students already preparing for their release from school. “And don’t forget to put your names on them.”

  As the students started making their way toward the front of the room, Sarah hung back, folded her drawing again and slipped it deep into her backpack.

  Nobody—nobody at all—was going to see this drawing.

  Except that even as the thought formed in her mind, she knew it wasn’t true.

  One person would see the drawing.

  She needed to find Nick.

  She needed to find him now.

  Nick knew something was wrong as soon as he saw Sarah coming down the main staircase. Her face was ashen and her limp even worse than usual, but he said nothing until he pushed one of the school’s heavy front doors open and they were both in the bri
ght sunlight outside. “What’s going on?” he asked, relieving her of her backpack as they started down the stairs. “Are you sick?”

  On the sidewalk, Sarah shook her head, taking a deep breath of the frosty air. “I just had a weird experience in art class—I mean, like, really weird! Remember how I told you about getting so lost in drawing a picture that I hardly even remembered doing it?” Nick’s pulse quickened but he only nodded, saying nothing. “Well, this afternoon the drawing was even worse than the one last night,” Sarah said as they crossed the street. “It was awful,” she went on, and shuddered as they kept walking. “I mean, really awful.”

  Nick stopped and turned to face her, and Sarah stopped, too. “Did you turn it in?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding?”

  “So where is it?” he asked, and when Sarah hesitated, he knew she had it with her. “Let me see it.”

  Her eyes met his for a moment, and he thought she was about to refuse. But instead of shaking her head she tilted it toward her backpack, looped over his shoulder. “It’s in there—way down at the bottom.”

  Nick unzipped the top and pulled out a folded piece of heavy art paper, then hesitated, no longer sure he actually wanted to see it. But he knew that whether he wanted to see the drawing or not, he had to.

  He had to know.

  Struggling to keep his fingers from trembling, he unfolded the sheet of paper and looked at the image.

  “Oh, jeez …” he whispered, his voice trailing off as he took in the nightmarish image of an eviscerated dog attacking its tormentor. When he’d taken in every detail, he folded it up again and shoved it back into Sarah’s backpack.

  She stared at him, waiting for him to say something, but instead he just began walking again. She fell in beside him, and for several minutes neither of them spoke. Then, when they were three blocks from the school, Nick broke the silence. “I saw what you drew,” he said softly. Then: “I even heard the dog.”