The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (20 page)

“Now, now,” he says, “there’s no need to shout” He lays aside his notebook, sits up straighter in his chair, and I can see something in his eyes that I’ve never seen before.

Fear.

He’s
afraid of
me!
What a rush! Mr. A-Am-In-Control-Here-At-All-Times is not so cool now, is he? All because of one tiny little shout.

I like the effect so much, I decide to shout some more. And once I start, I can’t stop. I shout and I shout I tell him he’s a stupid jerk who doesn’t know the first thing about psychiatry, that he’s the one who needs the shrink, not me. I shout that if he tells me one more time I have to take responsibility for my own actions, I’m going to hit him with that big gold lamp on the table beside his left elbow.

And then that’s what I do.

I don’t mean to. It’s not something I think about ahead of time. But the lamp is sitting right there beside him and it looks so heavy and so solid and I can’t resist it.

He was supposed to help me, and he didn’t.

I think the reason he doesn’t move out of the way in time is he can’t believe it’s happening. Not to him. That’s what I see in his face as I lunge for the lamp, grab it off the table, and bring it down hard on the left side of his head. I see astonishment in those dark, cold eyes behind the glasses. Not me, he’s thinking.

So much blood. I expected ice-water to flow from that coldhearted creep, but it’s blood, all right.

I feel bad for Tanner. He’s her father, after all. I guess they didn’t get along that great, but still … Tanner was always nice to me.

But, he
made
me do it! Sitting there so smug, so pompous, passing judgment on me. Shrinks aren’t supposed to pass judgment. Then he had to go and bring up that nasty business two years ago. That wasn’t my fault, either, but he made it sound like it was.

I need to think, but my head aches really bad.

He never even screamed. I know he told people that I wasn’t violent. I saw one of the reports he signed. I’ll bet he was sorry he ever wrote that when he saw that lamp coming at him.

Think, think
…

This is the worst. I can’t hide this. No way. His secretary has gone home. She never saw me come in. And I didn’t have an appointment, just dropped in on the off chance that he’d see me, so no one knows I was here except him and me. And neither one of us is going to tell.

But the police will check out his patients and they’ll find out about two years ago and they’ll come looking for me. They’ll put me away again.

I can’t go back to that place. I won’t.

Don’t panic, panic is the worst thing. It makes the headaches unbearable.

Think, think
…

There has to be a way.

They’re not taking me back there. I’ll do anything to stay out of that place.

Anything.

The first thing is, to get out of here. But how far can I go in this storm? The roads might be washed out.

I have to find a place to hide.

Somewhere where no one would think to look for me …

I think I know just the place
…

T
HE RAIN CAME AT
them out of the darkness at a wind-blown slant, silvery sheets of it slapping against the car. The windshield wipers made a steady, annoying, whoosh-whoosh sound as they worked frantically to do their job.

“We should have left Briscoe this afternoon instead of waiting until after supper,” Lynne Grossman told the three passengers in her new silver Toyota Camry. The car had been an unabashed bribe in return for Lynne’s grudging participation in a two-week July math refresher course at Salem University in preparation for freshman year beginning in September. The trip to the university was her first long drive in the new car. “This weather stinks! It’s raining so hard, I can’t see three feet in front of the car, and the defogger isn’t working.”

“We couldn’t leave earlier,” Daisy Rivers said. She was occupying the passenger’s seat. Her left hand repeatedly dove into a bag of cheese snacks, but she chewed and swallowed before she spoke. “I was working, remember? Unlike you, my parents didn’t buy me a brand-new car, and they’re not going to. If I want one, I have to earn the money myself. My boss said if I worked up until the very last minute, he’d hold my job for me while I’m at Salem for two weeks. I need that job when I get back, Lynnie.”

“I know.” Lynne swiped at the misted windshield with one hand. “I didn’t mean it was your fault, Daisy. Quit being so hyper.” She said it calmly, matter-of-factly, as she said almost everything. The fact that she now owned a car wasn’t the only difference between her and Daisy. Lynne was tall and athletic, with smooth, silky, very short, dark hair. She was efficient and even-tempered, except when her unexplained ability to grasp mathematical concepts made her crazy.

Daisy was tall, too, but there the similarities ended. Daisy Rivers was thin and blonde and deceptively fragile-looking, with small bones and a heart-shaped face. But she was anything but fragile, and anything but calm. She was energetic and high-powered. It was hard for her to sit still for more than a few minutes. When she wasn’t sitting in a car, she was in a state of perpetual motion, impatient and always prodding others to move at her pace. Few did.

Being a friend of Lynne’s was easy. Being a friend of Daisy’s was not. But Daisy was loyal to the core and fiercely protective of her friends, and most people felt that made it worthwhile.

Daisy was no more interested in taking the summer math session than she was in hopping a shuttle to the moon, but her acceptance at Salem was conditional … take the course and pass it or we won’t take
you.
No choice. She would much rather have left Briscoe for New York City the day after her high school graduation and make her mark out in the world. No more classes, no more homework, no more papers to write, and no more math. That would have been her first choice.

But Daisy Rivers had been poor all of her life. She was smart enough to know that without some formal training, the dresses, skirts, blouses, and pants and jackets that she designed in a huge sketch pad, would never become reality. Without Salem University, she would
stay
poor, and that wasn’t what she wanted.

College might be a drag, but it was the only way to get to where she wanted to be.

“We’ve already been driving for almost three hours,” Toni Davinci complained from the back seat. “If we don’t get out of this car soon, my body is going to stay permanently frozen in this position,”

“I second the motion,” Molloy Book agreed. She was slouched down beside Toni, her long legs in black leggings stretched out in front of her, her feet in black flats propped up on the armrest between Lynne and Daisy. “I hate this weather! It gives me the creeps. But right now I’d take my chances out there if it’d get me out of this back seat.”

Lynne leaned forward, peering through the misted windshield. “Oh, no!” she cried in a voice that made both Toni and Molloy sit upright, Lynne pointed. “A detour sign! Oh, I don’t believe this. I don’t know my way around this area well enough to take a detour.”

The other three stared through watery windows at the huge orange sign lit by a hanging lantern. DETOUR, ROAD FLOODED.

“There will be other signs, pointing the way,” Molloy said. “They’ll show us how to get back on the highway.”

Lynne groaned. “This is all I need! A stupid detour! As if bad weather and a defective defroster aren’t enough.”

“Calm down,” Daisy said. “We have to be almost there. Let’s just go. Anyway, a detour is better than driving on a flooded road, right? I can’t swim.”

“Neither can I,” Toni echoed from the back seat. “What’s the detour road look like? It’s not one of those awful dirt roads, is it? It’ll be a sea of mud after all this rain.”

“How should I know?” Lynne snapped. “I told you, I can’t see a thing.” But she steered the car off the highway and onto the side road. Without the illumination of highway pole lights, she drove more slowly and, after a few minutes, said in dismay. “It
is
a dirt road! And Toni was right, it’s all mud. I can feel the tires sliding.”

Molloy slid back down in the back seat. This trip was supposed to be a lark. Of the four of them, only she had been enthusiastic about attending the special math session at Salem. But her enthusiasm had more to do with the fact that her boyfriend Ernie Dodd was already on campus. He was attending full summer school in an effort to get a jump-start on his college education.

She couldn’t wait to see Ernie. He’d been gone two weeks already and it seemed like two years. They had talked on the phone every night, while her parents sat in the living room pretending to watch television. They weren’t. They were straining to hear every word of her conversation, their mouths pursed in disapproval. Not that they had anything against Ernie personally. How could anyone not like Ernie?

But the Dodds, all eight of them, lived on the “wrong side of town.” Molloy’s family lived on the “right side.” Ernie’s father worked in a factory. Molloy’s parents owned their own small but successful dry-cleaning shop. A Dodd wasn’t exactly what they had in mind for their daughter. What they had in mind was a handsome, cultured, premed or prelaw student driving an expensive car, whose family lived on the
right
side of town.

Ernie Dodd hoped to be a writer, a profession Molloy’s parents considered financially precarious. His car was an ancient pickup truck with its back window missing, and he honked the horn at the curb when he came to pick her up, instead of coming up to the house and knocking. Not that she blamed him. Her parents treated people who came to the house to sell magazines or vacuum cleaners better than they treated Ernie.

He was absolutely, positively, not what they wanted for her.

But Ernie Dodd, tall, awkward, and always, always badly in need of a decent haircut, was
exactly
what she wanted for herself. Ernie was funny and sweet and thoughtful and never, ever apologized for who he was or where he lived, which Molloy would have hated.

But because she had insisted on attending the same college as Ernie, her parents had refused to help her so she was going to have to work her way through, with the help of several small scholarships. Other people did it. She could do it, too, and would, if it meant being with Ernie.

Her parents would come around one day. Ernie was hard to resist.

They had been on the dirt road for fifteen minutes, the rain hammering down on the car roof, when Lynne said, “I have not one clue where we are. All I know is, we’ve been driving for hours. We should have reached Salem by now. Maybe we’re lost.”

“We’re not lost,” Daisy scoffed. “How could we be lost?”

“Well, where are all those other detour signs you mentioned, Molloy? I haven’t seen a single one.”

“We just haven’t got to them yet,” Molloy replied with less confidence than she felt. “So that means we’re right on course. When we’re supposed to turn, there will be a sign telling us to turn.”

“Unless the wind blew it down,” Toni said. She clutched her violin case tightly. It contained her most precious possession, the violin she had treasured since she was six years old and had lovingly nicknamed Arturo. She often joked that if a thief ever broke into her house, he’d have to kill her to get the musical instrument away from her. She was only half-joking.

Toni was only taking the math course at Salem because her friends were. She understood mathematics as well as she understood music. They seemed similar to her, and neither had ever given her a problem. But she was anxious to get to college. Attending summer school meant that in August, when they all entered for real, Salem wouldn’t feel so new and strange. She hated that feeling … being someplace new, not feeling like she belonged.

It was hard to imagine any of her friends ever feeling like they didn’t belong. Molloy had been president or vice-president of practically everything in high school, and Daisy was always surrounded by a group of people. It was hard, too, to imagine either of them afraid.

I’m afraid
now,
Toni thought, her hands seeking comfort from the violin case. Lynne isn’t that familiar with this car yet, the road is a sea of mud, we can’t see out of the windows, and I haven’t noticed the lights of a single house since we got on this road.

“Maybe we should turn around and go back,” Toni said hesitantly. “We could find a gas station on the highway and ask for directions.”

“That wouldn’t take away the detour,” Lynne pointed out sensibly. “We’d still have to go this way.” Her head turned from side to side. “Anybody see any lights?”

No one did.

“When they build a road,” Lynne said angrily, “why can’t they build it straight? It’s making me crazy, one curve after another, and I can’t
see
them until I’m right on top of them.”

“They don’t make them straight,” Daisy said, because sometimes there’s a
town
in the way, Lynne. What do you want them to do, mow down everything in their path just so you won’t have to turn a corner?”

Lynne shot her a disdainful glance.

Taking her eyes off an unfamiliar road for even a second in such bad weather conditions spelled disaster. The car swerved on the muddy surface and the rear wheels slid to the right.

Lynne gripped the steering wheel and fought to straighten the car. But in her panic, she overcorrected.

The car skidded, slid, then the wheels took hold and the car shot across the road and dove, nose down, into a shallow ditch overflowing with rainwater.

The engine made a soft, sighing sound as if to say, “Now look what you’ve done!” and died.

I
T’S A GOOD THING
I saw their headlights coming down on the back road and came out to check. If I hadn’t been looking out the upstairs window just then, I’d have never known anyone was out here. I suppose they saw my light, too. That’s why they’re headed this way. They saw my light and now they think there’s someone up here to save them. That’s a laugh.