Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall) (15 page)

The lobby was empty when she burst out of the stairwell and glanced around hurriedly. Joseph and Rudy were nowhere to be seen.

Rachel raced to the spot where she’d left the purse, prepared to scoop it up, turn and run. She’d go back up to the tenth floor and show Aidan the drawings.

At first, when the purse wasn’t where she thought she’d left it, she told herself she’d made a mistake, that she must have moved it and forgotten doing so.

But the shoulder bag, was nowhere to be seen in the lobby.

She
had
to have that purse.

A minute later, she got lucky. Rudy came in to take another load of art to his waiting car outside. To Rachel’s relief, Joseph wasn’t with him.

Rachel rushed over. “Have you seen my purse?”

“Purse? What purse?”

“Don’t tease, Rudy, please. This is important. Didn’t you find a big brown shoulder bag on the floor over there? Say you did, please!”

But he shook his dark, curly head. “I didn’t find anything.”

Rachel sagged in disappointment.

“But Joseph did,” Rudy added, deciding not to torment her any further. “He has it.”

Joseph had her purse?

“Listen,” Rudy said, beginning to move away from Rachel, “I have to go in the back for a minute and get some pads to put on the floor of my trunk before I stick those paintings in there. Joseph will be here in a sec with your purse.”

He was going to leave her here in the lobby alone, with Joseph on the way?

Rachel glanced up at the big, round clock high up on one wall. Ten past ten. Less than two hours until Monday. The Monday that she wasn’t supposed to “see.” It was almost here.

She had lasted this long. And she wasn’t stupid enough, after making it this far, to hang around alone in the lobby and wait for Joseph to come in and pick her off like a duck in a shooting gallery. The purse would have to wait. Joseph would, of course, destroy the sketches. Then what would she do for proof?

She saw, in the streetlamp-illuminated darkness outside, a figure approaching the door. Joseph.

She would have to wait until tomorrow to worry about what she’d do for proof now that Joseph had the sketches. Because if she didn’t get away that second, there wouldn’t
be
a tomorrow for her. YOU WILL NEVER SEE ANOTHER MONDAY.

Rachel turned. Her feet flew across the tile as if they were winged.

She disappeared into the stairwell just as Joseph pushed the big glass door open and strode into the lobby.

So she didn’t see Joseph’s eyes move toward the stairwell door as it swung shut that last inch or so.

Nor did she see Rudy emerge from the back room just then and follow Joseph’s eyes with his own.

Rachel ran up the stairwell until she reached the second-floor landing. Breathless with exertion and anxiety, her ankle throbbing, she knew she could never make it up nine more flights of stairs, and left the stairwell for the elevator. She knew she would be taking a chance. If Joseph had seen her darting into the stairwell, he could already be in one of the elevators, on his way upstairs to find her. The doors could slide open, and there he’d be, standing inside with a wicked smile on his face. Then he’d grab her and Monday would disappear forever.

Stop it! Rachel commanded. Stop it right now. You can’t walk up eight more flights of stairs, and that’s that. Joseph won’t be on that elevator. He
won’t
be.

He wasn’t.

No one was. Rachel had the car all to herself, and she stepped into it so awash with relief, she had to grab the railing inside to remain upright.

The elevator would take her to the tenth floor, she’d step out and find Aidan, Bibi, Samantha, and Paloma, tell them what she’d found on the back of Joseph’s canvas and, together, they would decide what to do.

If only she had her purse with the drawings inside. Even without the threatening note, even without the watercolor, even without those things, the sketches would have proved one very important thing: that those images, the ones she had described to everyone who hadn’t seen them, were
real.

But she didn’t have the purse. Joseph had it.

Still … if she could convince Aidan and the others that she was telling the truth, they might help her get that purse away from him before he could destroy the sketches.

He couldn’t even say that he had drawn the sketches
after
the fact. Because he’d made the fatal mistake of dating the drawings.

The “ten” button over her head lit up and the elevator slid to a halt.

Feeling more optimistic than she had since the day began, Rachel stepped out of the elevator on the tenth floor.

She turned to the right, toward the studios, and would have hurried down the hall to find Aidan and the others if something very hard hadn’t slammed against her skull just then and sent her flying sideways, into the wall.

She made a little sound, half-sigh, high-cry, and slid to the floor softly and quietly, her eyes closing as she fell.

I
T TOOK RACHEL A
few minutes as she gradually stirred back to a dazed consciousness to realize that she was lying down. But not in her own bed. That, she realized instantly. This was much harder and narrower than her own bed.

Was she in the infirmary? She had been hit on the head, she remembered, from behind.

Slowly, very slowly, her awareness increased. And with each new realization, her heart turned colder.

There was something under her neck, something stiff and uncomfortable, poking into the soft skin behind her ears. It felt like cardboard. Cardboard?

Her shoulders ached fiercely.

There was something over her eyes. She had opened them, she was sure of that, but she could see nothing, not even light. The covering felt soft … cotton, maybe? Her eyes had been covered with cotton?

And there was, she realized next, something in each of her ears. That, too, felt soft and cottony, and effectively muffled sound, as if she were wearing thick, furry earmuffs. There
were
sounds around her, but she could identify none of them beyond realizing that they weren’t infirmary sounds: no ring of a phone at the nurse’s desk, no padding rubber-soled footsteps marching across cold, hard tile, no cheerful voice declaring, “Well, aren’t
we
looking much better today!”

She was not in the infirmary. The muffled sounds she heard, as if from a distance, were different. The clank of something metal against glass? A spoon, maybe? Footsteps then, but lighter than a nurse’s rubber soles. A swishing sound, thick and wet … somebody stirring something?

Where
was
she?

Rachel was fully awake now. She moved her neck, trying to ease the discomfort of the sharp, cardboardy edge poking at her.

“Hold still,” a voice said from somewhere above her. “You can’t be moving around. You’ll ruin everything.”

The plugs in her ears, which she was sure were cotton balls, kept her from identifying the voice. She could barely hear it, let alone identify its owner.

What was it that she would ruin if she moved? Maybe she had a broken bone that needed to be set. She had hit that wall pretty hard.

No, if she had a broken bone, she’d be in the infirmary, and she had already decided that she wasn’t.

Then why did she have to lie still?

The only way to find that out was to remove the cotton from her ears and the pads from her eyes. Then she would know what was going on.

But when she attempted to lift an arm, she realized why her shoulders ached so fiercely. Her arms were tied behind her back, beneath her. She was lying on her arms. It was not only painful, but it rendered her arms, her hands, completely useless.

She was lying on a table with her arms bound beneath her, her eyes covered, her ears full of cotton. She was completely helpless. The image of herself lying like a trapped animal made her sick in its familiarity.

Because she’d seen that image somewhere before.

The watercolor painting danced before Rachel’s eyes, taunting, teasing. You! it seemed to say, you, you, you! It was
you
in the watercolor all along, and you never guessed! And now here you are …

Panicking, Rachel began to struggle against the ropes that bound her arms. She bucked and writhed, shaking the table. Her legs were free, so she kicked out with those. She would have tossed her head from side to side, but found that movement impossible with the cardboard collar around her neck.

“Stop that!” the voice above her hissed. “You stop that right now! Maybe you’d better keep in mind that I don’t need you conscious to do this. I can do it just as well with you off in dreamland, if that’s what you want. I’ll be only too happy to send you there myself if you don’t lie perfectly still.”

Rachel drew in her breath sharply. She knew now, with mind-numbing clarity, what was going on. Didn’t want to believe it, had been fighting the thought, but she knew now that continuing to deny it could be disastrous.

It was true. She was the girl in the floral watercolor. She was lying on this table to fulfill the image in that painting, just as Ted had fulfilled the image in the seascape and Milo had done the same for the still life.

Rachel Seaver’s face was about to be buried under plaster.

And there was one more unarguable fact, the worst of all. There was nothing in her nostrils. No plastic straws that would enable her to breathe. She could feel the cotton pads over her eyes, which she realized now would be removed the second before the plaster began to pour, when it would no longer matter if she saw her tormentor. And she could feel the cotton in her ears, there so that she wouldn’t recognize the voice. Those, too, would be removed before the plaster poured. But she could
not
feel the stiff, sharp plastic of a straw in either nostril.

He wasn’t even going to bother with giving her a way to breathe.

Because, as in her nightmare, this was not going to be a
life
mask. This was going to be a
death
mask. And for that, she didn’t
need
to breathe.

Rachel lay perfectly still. Because if she was going to have any chance at all of stopping the plaster from being poured over her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her face, she absolutely had to remain conscious. She had to
think.

Sounds of water running, distant and muted but unmistakable. The clanking of metal against glass, and moist, stirring sounds.

He was mixing the concoction that would soon slop down over her face, hardening quickly, cutting off the last breath Rachel Seaver would ever take.

She wasn’t going to see another Monday, after all.

Joseph? Had Joseph seen her slipping into the stairwell? He must have dashed to the other elevator and followed her up.

Except … except … Rachel struggled to think clearly. Joseph hated making masks. He had said so. It had bothered him, because he hated to admit failure, but he had admitted that he never mixed the plaster correctly, never let it dry the correct amount of time, and once even had to use an X-Acto knife to cut someone’s bangs in order to remove a hardened mask.

If Joseph couldn’t make a proper mask, would he really choose this way to kill someone?

Anyone could have taped that envelope holding the sketches to Joseph’s canvas.

Anyone.

Rachel refused to think about who made the best masks in Salem University’s art department. Or about how persistent that great mask-maker had been about creating a mask of her. Or about how annoyed he’d been when she declined.

Her mind focused instead on the X-Acto knife that Joseph had used to cut someone’s bangs.

X-Acto knife.

What had she done with the one she’d used to slit open the envelope?

Rachel’s heart beat wildly.
Where
was that knife? Hadn’t she slipped it into a back pocket of her jeans?

She groaned silently. It wouldn’t do her any good back there.

There had to be some way she could get at that knife. It was her only hope.

Testing, she moved her fingers. If she lifted her lower back the tiniest bit, she could flex the fingers on her right hand.

Could they reach that pocket, the one with the knife inside?

If she stretched them …

“Quit moving!” the voice hissed again. “If I have to tell you one more time …”

Rachel obeyed. But her heart sank. He must be standing directly over her. How could she wrest the knife from that pocket without moving a hair? She couldn’t. Impossible.

There had to be a way to distract him.

The watercolor … she focused on that, pictured it in her mind, searching it for details that might be helpful.

And found one.

In her dream, the glass pitcher of mixed plaster had been placed on a smaller table, near the girl’s right foot.

Near
her
right foot.

Her right foot was free. No ropes, no straps tying it down.

How could she be sure the pitcher was there? If it wasn’t there yet, and she kicked out, he’d realize the folly of placing the pitcher so close to her, and place it somewhere else. What was worse, such a movement would infuriate him and he’d knock her out and continue with the mask.

She heard then, the clanking of metal against glass, and knew he was still mixing. It was so hard to hear clearly with the cotton in her ears. But that sound was sharper than some and she was sure she wasn’t mistaken. If she strained with every ounce of her hearing, maybe she could somehow identify the sound of the pitcher being set onto its little table.

Suddenly, he began speaking, stirring the whole time. “You don’t understand, I suppose,” the voice above her said. “You’re not an artist, after all. Most people who aren’t won’t understand, and a lot of artists won’t, either. Narrow little minds never grasp the concept of greatness.”

Rachel wanted desperately to fumble for the knife, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she strained to listen over the cottony drone of his voice for the sound of the pitcher being deposited on the little table. Would it be a thud? A clink? What kind of sound should she be listening for?

“The idea came to me late one night when I was alone in the studio. If I could paint things and then make them happen, my art would do more than simply imitate life. It would
be
life. I would be the creator, you see?