Nightmare Academy (32 page)

Everything stopped. The music growled down to silence, the video games went black, the lights went out, the girls screamed.

The power was out. The room was in total darkness.

Pandemonium. Hands groping, people yelling, girls screaming. From somewhere in all the noise and confusion, Alex was shouting, “Quiet, everybody! Quiet! It's okay!” He started calling for his crew, getting them to work on the problem.

In a moment, everybody might quiet down and get reoriented. They might come up with a plan for dealing with the power outage.

Right now, nobody knew what to do about anything and couldn't see six inches.

Girl,
it's now or
never.

Elisha remembered an exit only ten feet to her right. She dropped her broom and moved right, bumping one body in the dark, but making it to the wall. With just a few seconds of searching by touch, she found the door and slipped through it. She wasn't the only one.

It was after dark, but with the stars and moon, not nearly as dark as inside the Rec Center. The power was out everywhere, the whole campus dark, but she was still in the open and visible, not safe. She ran toward the library, and could see two, maybe three other kids running at panic speed across the field. Rounding the corner of the library, she spotted a girl trying a door, whimpering when she couldn't open it, racing to another door, yanking it open, and ducking inside. Elisha almost ran into another girl—one of Warren's friends—running down the alley between the library and dorm D. The girl didn't even look at her, didn't even slow down, but ran straight into the woods, pushing, thrashing, disappearing into the undergrowth. Behind the dorms, the lid of a trash bin clanged shut right before a boy—it might have been Tom Cruise—knocked, whispered, and got some help climbing in from whoever had climbed in before him.

Elisha kept running. She had one quick stop to make in her dorm room and then—

She heard a scream from the woods and the growl of a huge animal, and that sound seemed to stir up more. From the thickly wooded hills all around the campus came the eerie, haunting echoes of animals in the night: the low growls of bears, the blood-chilling screech of cougars, the howls of wolves. The mountains had come alive, and the sounds seemed so close.

She stole into dorm C and down the dark hallway, barely able to see the doors, counting them until she came to room 4. She made it inside, found the flashlight, this time on Mariah's bed, and dropped to the floor, shining the light and reaching up under her bed.

Her radio was still where she'd hidden it, tucked among the bedsprings. She pulled it out, groped for the switch—

She dropped it—

It fell no more than a foot, hit the floor, and broke open. Metal washers scattered outward like mush from a dropped pumpkin. She grabbed the fallen radio case, and it was light, empty, just a thin half-shell of plastic.

Her hands trembled. She couldn't fathom what she was seeing, couldn't bring herself to believe what it meant.

Her radio had been gutted. Except for one battery still wired in to make the little red light come on—to fool her and Elijah into thinking the radio still worked—there was nothing inside the radio but metal washers and modeling clay.

With the shock wrenching her insides, she fell back against the wall, sick and shaking, holding the remnants of the only contact she might have had with the outside world. Slowly, wretchedly, she began to realize that every time she thought she was sending a message, she'd only been talking to a dead little box crammed with clay and washers.

Worse yet,
they knew.
Whenever, however those people in that big mansion did this, they had to know that she and her brother were not ordinary runaways. She and Elijah were never a secret to them. They knew all along.

Her head sank, her hands went limp, the empty radio case clattered to the floor as a different kind of darkness invaded her, numbing her mind, constricting her soul. She'd been in danger before and knew what fear was. She'd been on her own before and knew what it was like to be alone, at least for a while. But fear and loneliness were nothing compared to this.

Despair was trying to take her. Despair. Could anything be worse? Could there be any pit so deep, any trap so inescapable? As long as she had hope, she could handle fear and loneliness. But despair went straight for her hope, stealing it from her, leaving her with nothing but a blackened room, enemies all around, predators in the woods, nowhere to go, and no one to hear her cries for help except . . .

“Oh Jesus,” she prayed, and by now she couldn't help but weep, “what am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
Help me.

Please
help me.”

A miracle would have been so welcome, perhaps an angel to suddenly barge into the middle of this madness, offer some explanation that would make sense of it all, and carry her and her brother out of this nightmare and to safety, to Mom and Dad, to the ranch and home.

But there was no angel, no miracle.

She just had to cry, so she let go, abandoning herself to her sobbing, her hand over her mouth lest the sound of her anguish carry outside the room.

“I found a phone.”

“Sally,” came a voice.

She held back a sob.
Dear Jesus, no.
Don't
let them find me.

The voice came nearer. “Sally. Are you in here?”

It was Mariah. Friend or foe? What should she do?
Lord Jesus—

Too late. Mariah came into the room, stumbled over her, and then plopped down beside her on the floor, her back against the bed. Then
she
started crying. “It's all such a mess.”

Elisha wiped her own tears and pulled in her sobs. “What is it, Mariah? What's gone wrong—I mean, besides everything?”

“The big people up in the mansion have turned off all the electricity. They're trying to starve us out or freeze us out or something.”

“Mariah . . .”

“Joan.”

Elisha was about to get mad. “Do we have to play that stupid game now?”

“I'm not playing a game! That's my name!” She whimpered and sniffed as she said it, “I'm Joan Matheson. I live in Port Orchard, Washington, and I'm fifteen, and I ran away from home two weeks ago and I'm scared.”

Elisha wasn't sure this was happening. Was she actually hearing someone telling the truth? “Joan, are you being honest with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you do know about Jerry?”

“He's your boyfriend and now he's up in the mansion.”

“And what about Mr. Easley?”

“He used to work here but he got fired.”

“And what about the kid who was taken up to the mansion before Jerry and I got here? Did that really happen?”

“Yeah.”

“What was his name?”

“He wanted us to call him Mick, but Alex called him Alvin.”

“Tell me about Alex. Is that his real name?”

“No. It's Harold.”

“Joan . . .” Elisha's voice cracked. Her tears returned. “My name isn't Sally. It's Elisha. Elisha Springfield. I'm from Montana, and I'm scared, too.”

“Some of the kids are hiding. Alex—well, Harold, but now he wants everybody to call him Alexander—he says we'll be all right if we do what he tells us, but . . . who says so? You saw what he did to Warren. He could do that to anybody—anybody he doesn't like, or anybody who says something, or maybe . . . what about the girls? What if Alex or Rory or some of those guys want to do something to one of us? Who's gonna stop 'em?”

Elisha hadn't noticed yet, but the despair had left her. “We have to keep that from happening.”

“How?”

“We have to do whatever it takes. We have to think, and look, and pray, and let God show us what to do.”

“I found a phone.”

Elisha's next word stuck in her throat. It took a conscious decision to exhale and then bring in fresh air. “What did you say?”

They hurried through the back door of the office building, past the tools, shovels, rakes, hammers.

“I found it in the closet,” Joan whispered. “I was going to hide in there, but then I thought I should find you and tell you.”

They hurried into the front office, their one flashlight guiding their way, and there it was, resting on the computer desk where Joan had left it.

Elisha grabbed up the receiver and put it to her ear. The line was dead. “It isn't working.”

Joan was nervously looking around the room and said nothing.

Elisha traced the telephone's cord. “Well. It isn't even plugged in.”

“Oh, yeah. I didn't think of that.”

“Wait! Wait a minute!”

Elisha ducked under the desk, shining the beam of her flashlight up and down the wall until she found what she'd seen there earlier: a phone jack. She plugged the phone line in, backed out from under the desk, and grabbed up the receiver.

A dial tone.

Elisha wanted to cry again, but that wouldn't help right now.

She tapped out a number—her dad's cell phone—and waited.

The line started ringing.

Joan was nervous, drumming her fingers on the counter, looking down the hallway.

Ring . . . ringgg . . .

From the hall, a flashlight beam clicked on and began playing about the room. The beam caught Joan's face, her frightened eyes wide in the light.

“She's here,” Joan said.

Elisha heard a connection. “Hi, this is Nate Springfield,” came her dad's recorded voice. “I'm sorry I can't come to the phone right now . . .”

The beam of light came into the room and hit Elisha in the eyes, blinding her. She raised her own light and shined it back.

In quick flashes, in quaking light, like a ghostly, floating image hovering behind that tormenting beam, Alex's leering eyes looked back at her.

“. . . but if you'll leave a message, I'll get back to you . . .”

Another light clicked on behind Alex. She couldn't see the face, but it was somebody big.

A third light clicked on near the front door. “Too cool.” The voice was Rory's.

She searched with her light and found Alex's face once again. He was looking at Joan. “Good job.”

No. What was happening?

“Now you better get out of here,” said Alex, and Rory opened the front door.

Joan hurried to leave. Elisha caught her face one last time in the beam of her light. Joan looked back, shaking her head feebly, her face a tangle of confusion. “I was afraid.”

She ran out the door, and Rory closed it.

In the telephone, Nate's voice mail beeped for the message.

“You guys hold her,” said Alex.