Sleepwalk
Page 1
The Voice
Heather Fredericks lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling.
And then, from somewhere outside, she heard a voice.
“Heather.”
She lay still, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, waiting.
A few seconds later she heard the voice again.
“Heather, come outside.”
She didn’t stop to dress or put on a robe before obeying. She simply left her room, following the shadowy form.…
“Follow me.”
Only a step ahead of her, the wall of the canyon dropped away, falling nearly a thousand feet straight downward. Heather stopped, waiting again.
“Jump,” the voice commanded.
By John Saul:
SUFFER THE CHILDREN***
PUNISH THE SINNERS***
CRY FOR THE STRANGERS***
COMES THE BLIND FURY***
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS***
THE GOD PROJECT*
NATHANIEL*
BRAINCHILD*
HELLFIRE*
THE UNWANTED*
THE UNLOVED*
CREATURE*
SECOND CHILD*
SLEEPWALK*
DARKNESS*
SHADOWS*
GUARDIAN**
THE HOMING**
BLACK LIGHTNING**
THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES:
Part 1—AN EYE FOR AN EYE: THE DOLL**
Part 2—TWIST OF FATE: THE LOCKET**
Part 3—ASHES TO ASHES:
THE DRAGON’S FLAME**
Part 4—IN THE SHADOW OF EVIL:
THE HANDKERCHIEF**
Part 5—DAY OF RECKONING:
THE STEREOSCOPE**
Part 6—ASYLUM**
THE PRESENCE**
THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL**
And now available
John Saul’s latest tale of terror
NIGHTSHADE
* Published by Bantam Books
** Published by the Ballantine Publishing Group
*** Published by Dell Books
SLEEPWALK
A Bantam Book / January 1991
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1990 by John Saul
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher
For information address: Bantam Books
eISBN: 978-0-307-76798-1
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U S Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries Marca Registrada Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
v3.1
For Lee and Marshall—
So many places yet to go …
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Prologue
The woman stood at the blackboard at the front of her classroom, watching her students work on the problem she had laid out a few minutes earlier. Though her eyes flicked constantly over the class, her mind wasn’t registering the images her eyes were feeding to it.
The heat of the day was building, which was good.
The hotter the sun beating down on the roof, the less the joints in her fingers and toes, her hands, her feet—even her arms and legs now—hurt her.
That was some consolation, though not much. At least, although the winter’s cold threatened to make her totally immobile, she still had the summers to look forward to—the dry, desert summers, when the heat would soak into her bones and give her some tiny measure of relief, a slight easing of the pain her disease brought with it, a pain that grew each month, along with the ugly deformities of her misshapen joints.
She was supposed to be better now. The doctor had promised her the new treatment would work. No, that wasn’t actually true, she reminded herself. He’d said he hoped it would work; he hadn’t promised her anything
She gritted her teeth, and denied herself even the brief solace of a sigh as a sharp pain shot up from her left ring finger.
Her instinct was to rub the painful finger, but that would only make her right hand hurt more, and already she was barely able to hold the chalk as she carried on her class.
Against her will, her eyes traveled to the clock.
Ten more minutes and the noon bell would ring. Another day of summer school would be over.
She could make it.
In the fourth row of the classroom the boy stared once more at the problem he’d copied onto the paper on his desk, and quickly computed the solution in his mind. It was right, he was certain, but even if it wasn’t, he didn’t care.
He put his pencil down and let his gaze wander to the window, where the heat was making the mesa shimmer in the distance.
That was where he should be today—hiking up on top of the mesa or in the cool of the canyon, swimming in one of the deep holes the river had cut from the canyon’s floor, working the anger out of his system with physical exercise. He’d had another fight with his father that morning, and the last thing he’d wanted to do was go from the oppressiveness of his home to that of the school.
Perhaps he should just get up and walk out.
He tried to put the tempting thought out of his mind.
He had agreed to go to school this summer, and he would.
But it would be the last summer.
Indeed, these few weeks of school might be the last ever.
He looked up at the clock and sucked in his breath.
Nine more minutes.
Then, as he watched the second hand jerk slowly around the face of the clock, he had a sudden feeling he was not the only one concerned with the time.
He glanced instinctively at the teacher.
As if feeling his glance, her eyes shifted from the clock and met his for a moment, and he thought he saw the beginning of a smile on her lips.
Then she winced slightly and, as if ashamed that he’d seen her pain, she turned away.
The boy wondered why she kept teaching. He knew—everyone knew—how much the arthritis hurt her, how much it crippled her in the winter. Even now he could remember the day, the previous January, when the temperature had been well below zero and he’d seen her sitting in her car in the parking lot. He’d watched her for a few minutes, unable to see her face clearly through the moisture that had built up on the windshield, but still somehow able to sense her reluctance to step out of the warmth of the automobile into the bitter morning chill.
Finally he’d approached the car and asked her if she was all right.
She’d nodded, then opened the door.
&
nbsp; Slowly, painfully, she’d eased her legs to the ground, and finally, carefully, stood up, a gasp erupting from her lips as she battled the pain.
He offered to help her, but she’d shaken her head.
He’d turned away and hurried into the school building, but when he was inside he’d turned back and watched her through the glass doors.
She’d moved slowly, every step clearly an agony, her face down in an attempt to hide her pain.
But she’d kept moving, kept walking, not even hesitating when she came to the steps and had to pull herself slowly upward, gripping the iron railing with her gnarled left hand as her right hand clenched against the pain.
She wouldn’t give up.
She’d never give up.
She’d keep teaching, and keep browbeating her students to do better and work harder, until the day she died.
The boy smiled slightly as he remembered the last time he’d been subjected to one of her tongue-lashings. She’d called him in after school and flung a homework assignment at him, her eyes fixing accusingly on his as she announced that she was considering failing him.
He’d studied the homework and discovered two mistakes, which he didn’t think was so bad. When he’d voiced that opinion, her eyes had only mocked him: two mistakes might be fine for most of the class; from him she expected more. Much more. He was smarter than the rest of them, and the work shouldn’t have been a challenge.
He’d squirmed, but she’d kept on: if he wasn’t going to try in high school, how was he going to get through college, where there would be a lot of people smarter than he?
That was when he’d told her he wasn’t going to college. Even now he wished he hadn’t.
Glaring at him, her fist had smashed down on the desk with a force that should have caused her to scream with agony. But he had been the one who flinched at the blow, and she had smiled in triumph.
“If I can do that,” she’d said, “then you can damn well go to college.”
He hated to think what she would say, at the beginning of his senior year, when she found out he was thinking of dropping out of high school.
But there were other things he wanted to do, things he didn’t want to put off.
The teacher glanced surreptitiously at the clock once more. Just two more minutes. She could go home and sit in her back yard, ignoring the shade of the cottonwood trees to bask in the sun, letting the full heat of the afternoon penetrate the pain as she worked on her lesson plans and graded the examinations she’d given the class that morning.
She began straightening up the clutter on her desk.
She frowned slightly as a strange odor filled her nostrils. For a moment she couldn’t quite identify it, but then realized what it was.
It was a malodorous scent, like a garbage dump on a hot day.
She sniffed at the air uncertainly, her frown deepening. The dump had been closed years ago, replaced by a treatment plant.
She looked up to see if anyone else had noticed the odor.
A flash of pain shot through her head.
She winced, but as quickly as the pain had come, it faded.
She shook her head, as if to shake off the last of the pain, then looked out at the class.
A red glow seemed to hang over the room.
She could see faces—faces she knew belonged to her students—but tinged with the red aura, seen dimly through a wall of pain, they all looked strange to her.
Nor could she put names to the faces.
The knife inside her head began to twist again.
Just a twinge at first, but building quickly until her skull seemed to throb with the pain.
The reddish glow in the room deepened, and the odor in her nostrils turned rank.
A loud humming began in her ears.
The aching in her head increased, and turned now into a sharp stabbing. She took a step backward, as if to escape the pain, but it seemed to pursue her.
The hum in her ears built to a screech, and the redness in the room began to flash with bolts of green and blue.
And then, as panic built within her, she saw a great hand spread out above her, its fingers reaching toward her, grasping at her.
She screamed.
The boy looked up as the piercing scream shattered the quiet of the room. For a split second he wasn’t certain where it had come from, but then he saw the teacher.
Her eyes were wide with either pain or terror—he wasn’t certain which—and her mouth twisted into an anguished grimace as the last of the scream died on her lips.
Her arms rose up as if to ward off some unseen thing that was attacking her, and then she staggered backward, struck the wall and seemed to freeze for a moment.
As he watched, she screamed once more and sank to the floor.
Her arms flailed at the air for a few seconds, then she wrapped them around her body, drawing her knees up to her chest as she rolled helplessly on the worn wooden planks.
The boy rose from his seat and dashed to the front of the room, kneeling down beside her. But as he reached out to touch her, she screamed yet again and scrabbled away, only to collapse a second later, sobbing uncontrollably.
When the ambulance took her away, she was still sobbing, still screaming.
The boy watched the ambulance leave, but even after it had disappeared into the distance, the sobs and screams lingered on, echoing in his memory.
Perhaps the other students who were in the classroom might forget the agony they’d heard and seen that day.
The boy never would.
Chapter 1
Judith Sheffield felt the familiar tightening in her stomach as the final bell rang. All that was left of her day was the walk to the parking lot, accompanied, as always, by the prayer that today the tires on her car would still be inflated and none of its windows would be smashed. The day itself hadn’t been too bad. Both her classes had gone well, which, she ruefully reminded herself, meant only that the disruptions had been minor.
At least today no fights had broken out in the classroom. After two years of teaching in East Los Angeles, Judith regarded that as a victory. But still, teaching during the summer session had been a mistake. She should have taken the summer off to relax, to rejuvenate herself and prepare for the far worse chaos of the regular school year. But she’d let herself be tempted by the extra pay, and conned herself into believing that the summer students would be more motivated than the regular term crowd.
The truth—which she knew perfectly well—was that the summer session students were there because they thought summer school would be a snap. Eventually they’d turned out to be right, for as Judith’s energies had slowly drained through July and into August, she’d begun to slip, ignoring assignments not turned in, and skipping her regular morning quizzes. As the heat and smog of the Los Angeles summer closed in, she’d even begun dismissing her second class early, eager to return to her tiny apartment in Redondo Beach, strip off her clothes, then spend the afternoon lying in the sun on the beach, listening to the surf and trying to pretend that teaching in Los Angeles would get easier as she gained more experience.
It was getting harder to pretend.
The bell rang, and the kids poured out of the classroom into the halls like an overflowing toilet. Judith chided herself for the cruelty of the simile, then decided she didn’t care—she tried to be a good teacher, tried to take an interest in the students, but if they didn’t care, why should she? And what, really, could she do about it?
She could try harder.
And she would.
For the next six weeks she would relax, and by mid-September she would be ready, searching for new ways to capture the kids’ interest, combing through the school’s budget for the money she would need for new books. Perhaps this fall she would even organize a painting party to make her classroom a little less drab. She could hustle some plaster from Bobby Lansky’s father—after all, it was Bobby who had hurled the desk that had made the hole in the wall—and she herself would spri
ng for the pizzas she’d use to bribe some of the better students into participating.
She waited until the last of the kids’ babble had died away, finished straightening the papers on her desk, then left her room, locking the door behind her. Warily, she glanced up and down the corridor, but it seemed deserted, and she told herself that today there would be no problems—it was the last day of summer session, and even the worst troublemakers would have been eager to get out of the building.
But as she moved toward the back staircase, she thought she heard a faint shuffling sound. She froze, listening.
A snicker, echoing maliciously, drifted through the hall.
She turned and started toward the main staircase at the other end of the hall.
Her step quickened and she instinctively clutched her heavy leather bag tighter, one hand gripping its shoulder strap while the other hovered protectively over the purse’s flap.
A low whistle sounded behind her, and she steeled herself against the urge to break into a run.
Another whistle, slow and seductive, echoed in the hallway, and Judith felt her face turning scarlet.
She should be used to the wolf whistles by now—she heard them every day. Most of the time she simply ignored them.
But today, in the deserted third-floor corridor, the sound held an ominous note.
She hesitated at the top of the stairs, refusing to glance behind her, peering down the stairwell itself.
Empty.
She started down, moving quickly, one hand, on the banister. She had made the first turn, and started down the fifteen steps to the second-floor landing, when suddenly she heard another whistle.
Two boys she didn’t recognize stepped into the wide opening provided by the double doors on the landing below. They gazed up at her, smiling mockingly.
Though Judith knew they were no more than seventeen or eighteen, their eyes seemed much older, and they slouched in the doorway with a dark malevolence.
Judith paused as the familiar fear reached out to her once more. Her fingers tightened on the strap of her bag, and she slowly continued her descent.
One of the boys whistled again, while the other let his fingers stroke suggestively at his groin. “Got something for you, pretty teacher,” he said. “Wanta see it?”