The Coffin (Nightmare Hall) (13 page)

She slapped against the door for what seemed like hours. She was about to give up when there was a whispering sound beneath her feet. When she looked down, a small piece of white paper was sliding underneath the door. Gasping, Tanner bent and snatched it off the floor.

The writing on the notepaper was Jodie’s. It read, simply,
Tanner? Are you in there?

“Oh, God,” Tanner sobbed gratefully, slumping against the door awash with relief. Finally! Finally, someone had found her!

She was about to be saved.

J
ODIE WAS AS SURPRISED
as Tanner to find the back door unlocked.

She had been waiting in the backyard, hiding behind a tree, trying to decide what to do, when she heard someone leave the house by the side door next to the driveway. Although she had rushed to that side of the house, she had only seen enough of the figure departing through the dark and the rain to realize that it definitely wasn’t Tanner. And there was something very weird about it, something about the head, but Jodie couldn’t tell what it was exactly. Maybe he was wearing a funny kind of rain hat.

Jodie was pretty sure of two things. It had looked like a guy, and it
wasn’t
Tanner’s father. So what was he doing in Tanner’s house? He couldn’t be burglarizing it. He’d have to have a car or van for that, and she didn’t see one. He’d taken off on foot. How much could you steal on foot?

Jodie’s skin crawled. What was a stranger doing in Tanner’s house?

There was only one way to find out. She would have to go inside.

If all the doors were locked, she’d break a window, as Charlie had suggested.

But all the doors weren’t locked. When Jodie sneaked up onto the porch and turned the doorknob, her mouth fell open with surprise as it turned easily and the door opened. If Tanner really had gone off to the Orient or whatever, she never would have left a door unlocked.

Jodie pulled the door open and peered inside. Except for a piece of material hanging over the edge of the freezer, nothing looked weird. The back porch and the kitchen were clean, and empty.

Maybe Tanner was sick. Maybe she was upstairs, so sick that she couldn’t answer the phone or the doorbell, couldn’t even call a doctor. There were probably rare, exotic fevers that did that sometimes. It would be awful if Tanner had been sick all this time and they hadn’t even known it.

Quietly, the way one does in a silent house, Jodie closed the door and moved on into the kitchen, walking cautiously, as if she expected someone to jump out from behind a door at any second.

There was a small lamp on in the dining room to her right, another in the living room at the front of the house, also on her right, and a light shining from the hall upstairs. Dr. Leo was apparently willing to pay an expensive electricity bill in order to fool burglars, Jodie was grateful. Bad enough creeping around in someone else’s house, without having to do it in the pitch-dark.

She went upstairs first, hoping as she opened Tanner’s bedroom door that she would find Tanner lying under the covers, maybe with a box of tissues and a bottle of aspirin at her side.

But the bed, neatly made, was empty.

Jodie sagged against the doorframe. If Tanner
were
here, this was where she would be. A serious illness was the only thing that would have kept Tanner from Charlie’s side after the accident, that is, if Tanner were still in the area.

Clearly, she wasn’t.

The note hadn’t been a joke.

At least, now they knew. But, Jodie thought miserably, how am I ever going to break this to Charlie? He was so sure Tanner wouldn’t go off and leave him, not without calling first. He’d be devastated.

But Tanner wouldn’t have, Jodie heard him saying, and she knew, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that he was right.

Moving swiftly and surely, Jodie left the doorway to move to the double closet along one wall. She pulled the folding doors open.

The closet was full. There wasn’t a bare hanger anywhere in sight. The upper shelves were crammed full of heavy sweaters, the carpeted floor littered with shoes.

Clamping her lips tightly together, Jodie whirled and ran to the triple dresser along the opposite wall.

The drawers, like the closet, were full. Lingerie, T-shirts, pajamas, sweatsuits, scarves, not a single drawer had so much as a dent in the piles of clothing.

As if that hadn’t told Jodie the whole story, a framed picture of Charlie, grinning widely, sat on the dresser. Jodie glanced over at the bedside table. Another picture, this one of Charlie and Tanner together, both in shorts and Salem University T-shirts, standing on the riverbank behind school, their arms around each other. Both were smiling.

Jodie leaned against the dresser. Tanner had said in her note, “See you next fall.” Who packed for months in the Orient or anywhere else for that matter without making a dent in closet or drawers?

And Tanner would never,
never
have gone off and left these pictures behind. Not in a million years.

Jodie turned and ran lightly down the stairs, then stood, perplexed, in the hall. What to do? Call the police? Call Charlie? No, he was in the infirmary. He might have a relapse or something when she told him he’d definitely been right.

The noise Jodie heard then was so soft, so muted, she wasn’t sure she’d actually heard anything. A faint slapping sound, waves against a shore, someone smacking at a pesky fly, a piece of paper flapping in the wind? Like that. An insignificant sound, nothing that told her anything important.

But it came again, and then a third time.

From somewhere off to her left.

Jodie turned. The music room. The room Tanner hated. Completely soundproofed, one of the reasons Tanner hated it. “It was like the rest of the world had disappeared when I was in there,” she’d said. “I’ve never felt that alone anywhere else.”

Jodie reached out to try the doorknob. Locked. But the faint slapping sound came again. It was coming from behind the door, she was sure of it.

Jodie moved closer. If someone screamed or yelled or shouted from inside that room, would they be heard from outside? Did soundproof really mean exactly that? That not a single sound could escape those four walls?

What about if you were inside? Could someone inside that room hear sounds from the outside?

Probably not.

“Tanner?” she said softly, and then, realizing how foolish that was, said it louder. “Tanner?”

No answer.

And the slapping sound had stopped.

Nothing but silence.

But Jodie was like a dog with a bone now. The closets upstairs, still full, the drawers, still packed with Tanner’s clothes, the photographs of Charlie, had convinced her that Tanner had never left this house. And there
had
been a sound, no matter how small, from inside the music room.

She thought deeply for several minutes. Then she turned and ran to the small telephone table in the hall, found a notepad and a pen, and scribbled a hurried message. Just a few words. But if she was right, those few words would be enough.

Her heart was pounding like a tom-tom as she slid the piece of paper under the door. The threshold was sealed so tightly, she was sure for a second or two that even something as skinny as that piece of paper wouldn’t slide through. But she kept pushing, and finally, it slid free of her hands.

Then Jodie waited.

On the other side of the door, Tanner picked up the note and read it. And rejoiced.

Jodie hadn’t even signed it. But it didn’t matter. The note, brief though it was, was enough. Someone had found her!

But she was wasting time, reveling in the joy of having been found. She had to answer the note quickly, before Jodie decided the house was empty, after all.

Tanner ran to her father’s desk. It smelled of lemon oil. But this was not a man who kept piles of letters and magazines and bills scattered across his furniture. There was not a piece of paper anywhere in sight. There was a paisley cup filled with newly sharpened pencils, a matching blotter, a framed photograph of Tanner from tenth grade, a heavy metal ruler, an expensive gold pen in a holder, a brass business card holder boasting a neat stack of crisp white cards bearing Dr. Leo’s name and profession, and a large Scotch tape dispenser. But there was not a single piece of paper.

Muttering under her breath, “Neat freak, neat freak!” Tanner grasped at the center drawer’s brass handle and gave it a tug. Locked. Of course. They were probably all locked up tighter than a penitentiary.

They were.

Gasping in frustration, Tanner’s eyes darted about the room. There had to be a piece of paper somewhere in this room.

The piano bench. The lid lifted, and underneath that lid there were stacks of sheet music, maybe even some music composition books.

Tanner ran. Jerked the lid upward. Grabbed the first piece of sheet music she saw. Then she ran back to her father’s desk and yanked the gold pen from its holder to scribble,
I’m here! Help! T.
across the top.

Back in front of the door, she threw herself to the floor, lying on her stomach as she pushed the sheet music into the tiny crack beneath the door.

It didn’t fit.

Too thick.

She pushed and pushed, sobbing with frustration, but the top edge of the sheet caught, crumpled, and refused to move. Desperate, she pushed harder, but all that did was crumple the bottom half of the sheet as well, until what she was holding in her hand looked like a used napkin.

“Oh, God,” Tanner whispered, and scrambled to her feet. All of the sheet music was the same texture, the same thickness. No good, no good …

The lavatory … the stack of paper towels … would one of those be thin enough?

“Don’t leave, Jodie,” she whispered frantically, “don’t leave, not yet! I’m coming, I’m coming!”

She didn’t even feel the pain in her feet as she dashed across the carpet to the lavatory, threw herself inside, clutched a handful of towels to her chest and ran back to the door again, where the gold pen lay waiting.

Scribbling the same message, whispering, “Don’t leave, Jodie, don’t give up and leave!” Tanner thrust the paper towel under the door.

It stuck … but just for a moment, and then Tanner sagged in relief as the towel disappeared from sight.

In the hallway, Jodie, crouched beside the door, stared as the waffled piece of paper edged its way toward her. Grinning with glee, she snatched it up and read it. And shouted for joy, “Tanner! Tanner, that’s you? You’re in there? Hallelujah! We
knew
you hadn’t deserted us, we knew it, Charlie and I.”

Tanner, lying with her ear pressed against the tiny crack at the bottom of the door, heard Jodie’s words. They were faint, but discernible, and they felt like drops of water after a long thirst. Another human voice … not
his
not Sigmund’s! She felt a rush of warmth for Jodie. It had been very brave of her to come into this house alone.

“Is Charlie okay?” she whispered into the tiny gap and then realized that Jodie certainly couldn’t hear her if she whispered, so she repeated the question, this time in a shout.

Jodie had to kneel next to the door to make herself heard. “Yes!” she cried, her lips pressing into the wood. “Yes, he is! How can I get you out of there? Where’s the key?”

“
He
has it!”

“He?” Until then, Jodie hadn’t really thought about
how
Tanner had become trapped in the music room. But if she had thought about it, she would have assumed it was accidental, an oversight on Tanner’s part somehow.

The words
“he
has it” changed the picture completely. It stunned Jodie. She hadn’t thought, hadn’t let herself think, as Charlie had, that something criminal had happened to Tanner. But that figure she’d seen leaving the house … that must be the “he.”

Why would someone want to keep Tanner a prisoner in this house?

“Is there another key?” Jodie called out.

“No, I don’t think so, I don’t know, Jodie, get me
out
of here! He’s crazy!”

“Let me look for another key. Hold tight, Tanner, I’ll be right back.” Jodie searched the hallway, checking under the stair treads, over the doorframe, in the brass umbrella stand near the front door. Nothing. No sign of a key.

She hurried into the kitchen, hunting for a key rack. They had one at home, back in Buffalo, in the shape of a big, fat, black and white cow. Her father had nailed it on the wall next to the refrigerator.

There was a bulletin board in the kitchen, but no key rack. Jodie went on into the back porch. There could be a key rack by the back door.

There wasn’t.

If she had to, she could take the door off the hinges. She’d seen her mother do it more than once when one of her younger brothers or sisters had locked themselves in the bathroom. All she needed was a screwdriver or putty knife and a hammer.

She glanced around the small, knotty pine-paneled porch for some sign of tools, murmuring, “I’m going to get you out of there, I promise!”

And a voice from behind her said lightly, “Guess again.”

I
N THE MUSIC ROOM,
still lying with her face pressed up against the door, Tanner called anxiously, “Jodie? Jodie? Are you still there?”

Something was wrong.

Something had happened. Something bad. Jodie had been gone too long. She would have been back by now if something hadn’t happened.

Tanner, her eyes filled with dread, pushed herself to a sitting position beside the door. No, no, no! She’d been so close! So close to getting out. What had happened? Was
he
back? Had he found Jodie going through the house, searching for the key?

What had he done to Jodie?

In despair, Tanner opened her mouth and screamed Jodie’s name repeatedly until her throat was raw. She didn’t care if
he
heard. What did it matter? He wasn’t going to let her go, anyway, no matter how cooperative she was. He had never intended to let her go, she knew that now. The mask was just a way of tormenting her, letting her think she’d be alive to identify him.

The sound of her anguished screams for Jodie rocked the music room.