Student Body (Nightmare Hall) (12 page)

The smell of lighter fluid was stronger now, bringing tears to my eyes. “Yes, I’m sure. Of course I’m sure. Eli, it’s … he’s going to do something terrible, I can feel it!”

“But pneumonia is the least of a burn victim’s problems,” we heard then. “You know, you don’t feel any pain at first. Shock takes over, and you don’t even know how terrible the burns are, how layers and layers of your skin have been destroyed, until later when the pain sets in. And I’ve read that if infection or pneumonia doesn’t get you and you do recover, you wish a thousand times that you hadn’t. They have to scrub off the dead skin, you know. One of the most agonizing medical procedures ever.”

Eli moved away from me, bent down, looked into the darkness behind us. Suddenly, he disappeared, and I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

“There’s something here. An opening.”

A sudden surge of hope sent me in the direction of his voice. I had thought the shaft we were trapped in was narrow from top to bottom and that the walls were solidly packed dirt and rock. But at the bottom of the wall behind the spot where Eli and I had stood face-to-face, the space suddenly widened, and it was there that Eli had found the opening. Terribly small and dark, but still …

“This must have been an animal burrow,” Eli remarked, dropping to his hands and knees to explore the opening. “That could mean there’s another entrance. Exit. A way out. I wonder if our friend upstairs knows that?”

We were both peering into the darkness behind the opening when the voice above us called out, “Look out be-loh-ow!” and liquid began dripping into the mouth of the pit.

The smell was unmistakable. It really
was
lighter fluid. Not a lot of it. It wasn’t pouring in, or cascading in. Just a steady drip. Still, if we hadn’t already moved from our original positions, it would have hit us, landing on our hair and clothes.

The lighter fluid began to pool on the ground in the center of the hole. I moved to cover it with the tarp, but Eli stopped me. “Grab it,” he ordered. “We might need it.”

I obeyed, darting quickly away from the opening, the tarp in my hands. “He’s planning on burning us alive,” I whispered in horror into Eli’s right ear. “If this opening isn’t really a tunnel, if it really doesn’t lead anywhere, we’re dead.” My voice rose. “We’ll burn to death, Eli! Or suffocate from the smoke!”

“Matchmaker, matchmaker, light me a match,” the voice sang, and we heard the match striking.

“Eli!” I screamed, glancing frantically over my shoulder, expecting to see an explosion of flame behind us.

Not yet. The mummy-figure was still singing away, reluctant to stop terrorizing us just yet. He was enjoying himself. Then the first match must have burned out, because I heard him strike another. Any second now, any instant, the pit would explode in flames.

Eli got down on his hands and knees, told me to do the same, and then said, “Throw that tarp over us. If there’s smoke, maybe it’ll help.”

Then we were crawling forward, the tarp draped over us.

That narrow black tunnel wasn’t someplace I wanted to go. I don’t like narrow, enclosed spaces, I’m not wild about pitch-blackness, and it occurred to me as I began crawling that there were probably slimy, crawling things in there.

But anything was better than burning alive.

It was impossible to see anything but the outline of Eli’s sneaker soles, just ahead of me. The tunnel smelled dank, a little sour, and I wondered if something had died in there. Had something been trapped because there was no way out … and died?

The space was so narrow, Eli had to crawl on his belly, pushing through the dirt with his elbows and knees and the toes of his sneakers. I did the same. The tarp scraped along the ceiling of the tunnel, and I had to keep pushing it back into place. It was the only protection we had if the tunnel began filling with smoke.

“Pray!” Eli demanded over his shoulder. “Pray, Tory!”

I knew what he meant. For all we knew, this tunnel led nowhere. When a lit match was finally dropped into that pool of lighter fluid, this narrow passageway would quickly fill up with smoke and we would suffocate.

Still, when the explosion behind us finally came and we heard the sound of flames licking at our heels, we crawled faster, even though we knew that we might well be headed toward a dead end. Literally.

T
HE TUNNEL BEGAN FILLING
with gray, acrid smoke. As if that weren’t bad enough, the passageway quickly grew even narrower. We could barely lift our heads as we pushed with our knees and elbows as fast as we could over the damp earth. It had been hard to breathe before; it was quickly becoming impossible.

My chest and head ached, my knees, hands, and elbows were rubbed raw, and I could feel myself losing hope. We weren’t going to get out of this alive. If the passage had begun to widen, if we could have seen a patch of light ahead of us, it wouldn’t have seemed so hopeless. But there was nothing ahead of us in the narrow tunnel but darkness.

“Eli,” I whispered, slowing down. “Eli, I can’t …”

“Yes, you
can
!” he barked angrily, and then got caught up in a coughing spasm. When it had passed, he repeated, “You keep going, Tory, you hear me? You
keep going
!”

I tried. I tried so hard. I didn’t want to die. I still had so many things I wanted to do. If I
was
going to die, I didn’t want it to be in this damp, dark hole so far beneath the surface of the earth. As if I were already buried.

But I was closer to the smoke than Eli was. The tears pouring down my face now were involuntary and had nothing to do with sadness. They were from the smoke assaulting my eyes. And I simply could not breathe. I tried. But the smoke was gobbling up what little precious air there was.

I didn’t call Eli’s name again. I knew if I did, he’d turn back to help me, and then we’d both die. Maybe at least he would make it out safely. I felt sad … so very, very sad, knowing I would never see anything above-ground again.

When my nose and mouth had filled with the thick, pungent smoke, and there was no way at all for me to take another breath, I just stopped crawling, lay my head down on my arms and closed my eyes.

And the minute I did, the heavy, hurting sadness was replaced. It became instead a fierce, hot anger toward the person who had done this to me. He was probably even now standing up there laughing, believing that Eli and I had burned to death.

No!

From a thousand miles away, I heard Eli calling my name. He said something else, too, but in my half-conscious fog, I couldn’t tell what it was.

I don’t remember crawling the rest of the way. I don’t know how I did it, or how long it took, or how much it hurt. I only remember lying on the ground out in the open, the wonderful, glorious open. I remember opening my eyes and looking up to see blue sky overhead. Then I saw Eli next to me, his glasses gone and tears streaming down his face, maybe from the smoke or maybe not, and I remember him swiping at those tears with one dirty, filthy hand, and I knew he was embarrassed.

And I reached up with my own dirty, filthy hand, to gently wipe from his face a few tears that Eli had missed.

Then we both began coughing our lungs out.

We coughed for a long time.

When the spasms had finally passed, I lifted my head and glanced around. What I saw was nothing but ugly, fire-ravaged woods. But to me, it was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.

Eli, thinking maybe that I was looking for our attacker, said hoarsely, “He’s gone. I guess he thought, mission accomplished, and split. We’re safe, Tory.”

For the moment. As grateful as I was to be alive, it would have been stupid and foolish of me to think it was over. It wasn’t. Not as long as
he
…
it
… was out there.

“Isn’t it weird,” I said, my voice as raw and husky as Eli’s, “that the sun is still shining, and it’s still Sunday afternoon? I mean, don’t you feel like a whole lifetime passed by while we were in there?”

I could tell by the look on his filthy, streaked face that he knew exactly what I meant.

I sat up, painfully aware that every inch of me hurt. My palms, knees, and elbows were bloody and raw, my neck and back hurt, and my chest ached.

Exhausted, I leaned back, against Eli. He felt very safe and comfortable.

Just for that little while, I stopped being afraid of the mummy-thing.

We sat there for a long time, me with my head on Eli’s shoulder. We were so grateful to be alive. We didn’t talk. We just kept gulping in huge mouthfuls of air that felt wonderful to our aching lungs.

After a long while, Eli finally broached the subject of telling the police what had happened to us.

“We can’t go to the police, Eli,” I argued in my new smoke-induced croak. “How can we? The first thing they’d want to know is what we were doing out here. No one’s supposed to be in the park. We can’t very well tell them we were looking for your key chain, can we? And even if we got past that, they’d ask us next what our attacker looked like. Do you really want to tell the police that we fell into a trap set for us by a … a mummy?”

“Well, first of all,” Eli argued, “it’s not a mummy. There’s no such thing.”

“I just don’t think there’s any way we can go to the police about today without being questioned about Friday night,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” he finally agreed. “Look, I think we’d better get back to campus. But we can’t go back looking like this.”

My turn to agree, I didn’t have a mirror, but if I looked one-tenth as bad as he did, with soot and dirt coating his skin and hair, I didn’t want anyone to see me. It wasn’t just vanity. The way we looked would raise a lot of questions.

We were getting up, slowly, painfully, when Eli exclaimed, “I don’t believe it!” and began laughing.

I couldn’t imagine what he could possibly find funny. But when I looked up, he was holding the key chain in his hand. And he was still laughing.

“Where …?”

“Right there,” he said, pointing to a spot covered with fire debris. “I bumped that burned log when I was getting up, and it moved a hair. The key chain was underneath it, untouched.”

Then I laughed, too. We had found what we’d come for, after all, in spite of everything. But what a price we’d paid for a key chain that had originally cost less than four dollars.

We made our way back to the river, found a shallow pool at the edge of the riverbank and did the best we could at cleaning up, splashing our faces, arms, and hair with the chilly water.

“It’s got something to do with the fire, and Hoop,” Eli said as, damp but somewhat cleaner, we walked back to campus along the riverbank. “The way it’s all bandaged up like a mummy, the gauze trail … all of that is meant to remind us of Hoop. So someone knows we were there Friday night. May even know we started the fire.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “If it’s a friend of Hoop’s, they could just be guessing that we lied about the park and that we were with Hoop all the time. That we somehow got out of the park, and he didn’t. And so they’re blaming us for that.”

“It’s like being convicted without a trial,” Eli said, “Verdict: guilty.”

“Well, we
are
,” I couldn’t refrain from saying.

That closed us both down, and we didn’t talk the rest of the way to campus.

Nat was sitting on her bed when I came in, reading the school newspaper. Her eyes widened when she saw me. “What on earth happened to you? And where have you been? Bay’s been calling. So has Mindy. The Sigma Chi thing is tonight, and Mindy’s frantic that we’re not going to go. She says she needs our support.”

I’d forgotten all about that stupid thing at the Sigma Chi house. Mindy was in the running for Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, and her competition was stiff. Two other cheerleaders, and the girl who had been Homecoming Queen in October, Shannon Wyoming. I’d known about this party for weeks. The thought made me sick. But it meant so much to Mindy, and we had all promised faithfully that we’d be there to support her.

How could we possibly go now? How could we show up at Sigma Chi all dressed up and ready to party after everything that had happened?

I knew I should tell Nat how close to death Eli and I had come that afternoon. She still didn’t even know about the mummy-thing. If that thing really was angry about Hoop and the fire, it was angry with all five of us, and it could come after Nat at any time. In fact … maybe it already
had
and she was keeping it to herself, just as I was. Lately there was so much distance between us. It was difficult to talk.

I sat down on my bed. “Nat,” I asked, cautiously, “you haven’t been … no one’s threatened you or anything lately, have they?”

“
Threatened
me?” She looked so blank that right away I knew I’d been off-base. Maybe it just hadn’t had time to get to her yet, it had been so busy with me. And Eli. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind. I just thought maybe some of Hoop’s other friends guessed that we were lying and might have been giving you a hard time.”

“Oh. No, no one’s even hinted that they know the truth. So far, anyway. Listen, are you going tonight or not? We promised.”

“I can’t believe they’re still giving that party, with one of their own lying near death in a hospital bed.”

Nat shrugged. “Life goes on,” she said almost callously. “The party’s been planned for weeks. Too late to cancel it now. Bay says the thinking is, they all
need
a party at that house, to take some of the gloom away. And I saw Boomer today. He’s a Sigma, and he said they felt they owed it to Hoop. That he’d want them to have the party.”

Well, that sounded pretty stupid. Still, I decided to go anyway. Because the Sigma Chi guys were, besides us, Hoop’s closest friends. And if we were being attacked by someone who was trying to avenge what had happened to Hoop, it could very well be a Sigma member. Being in that house might give Eli and me some idea of who it might be, and we’d be safe enough with a crowd around.

I would have to talk Eli into going. I wasn’t sure why it was important that he be there, or why I didn’t think of Bay first, but that was how I felt. I wanted Eli there.