Captives (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  When Molloy’s mother began pressing him for details as to exactly where Molloy had said she was when she called him, Ernie was saved by the line going bad again. He could still hear Mrs. Book’s voice over a blend of crackling and spitting noises, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He hung up.

  Someone knocked on his door and, for just a split second, Ernie had the eerie feeling that Mrs. Book had magically transported herself to Devereaux dorm and was standing outside his door waiting for answers to her questions.

  It was Ernie’s friend Simon, a tall, lanky baseball player. His hair was drenched, his face dripping, his windbreaker and jeans clinging to him. He was with his fellow baseball player, Elise Cook. Tall, blonde, and broad-shouldered, her short blonde hair was wet, and neatly combed into place, as if she’d just taken a shower. Her jeans and Salem T-shirt were dry. Elise lived at Devereaux. Simon didn’t.

  “You were out in this?” Ernie asked Simon, letting them in.

  “No other way to get here, pal. Couldn’t find any underground tunnels. You hear about Leo?” Simon asked, shedding his windbreaker and reaching into the bathroom for a towel. Unwilling to sit in his wet clothes, he leaned against the bathroom doorframe. “The police are all over campus. One guy told me they think it was one of Leo’s patients. That includes us, Ernie. They’ll be knocking on our doors any minute now.”

  Elise slouched in Ernie’s desk chair, long legs stretched out in front of her, silently watching as Ernie sat down on the bed and looked at Simon in surprise. “Knocking on my door? I only saw Leo that one time. When I was feeling so bummed about being away from Molloy. I told you guys about it.”

  Elise nodded. “I remember.”

  “He wasn’t much help,” Ernie continued. “Talked about something called codependence and never said a single word about love.” He didn’t add that he had, in fact, become so angry with Dr. Leo he had shouted, and his secretary had stuck her nose into the office to see if anything was wrong, meaning should she run to the phone and place a call to campus security? His name would probably be right at the top of the list of patients she handed over to the police. “I didn’t go back and I don’t consider myself one of his patients. You didn’t see him that much, either, did you?” he asked Simon.

  “Just twice. But my name’s in his files. I guess the word’ll get out now, won’t it? I wonder what people will say? Macho baseball player sees shrink over an allergic reaction to his new baseball uniform. Anyway, he wasn’t helping me. That’s why I only saw him twice.”

  “I saw him more than that,” Elise volunteered. “For my insomnia. And he did help. Arthur recommended him.”

  Simon laughed rudely. “Arthur? You did something Arthur recommended?”

  “It helped.” Elise began nervously running her fingers through her cropped hair. “I was off my game because I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Arthur said he never went a single day without seeing Dr. Leo, so I thought I’d give it a try.” To Simon, she said with dread in her voice, “You think that we’re all suspects? Just because we were patients of his?”

  Simon shrugged. “Looks that way.”

  Ernie began pacing back and forth in front of the rain-streaked window. “What really bothers me,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “what is really driving me nuts, is that Molloy is out there and they haven’t caught that guy. I mean, isn’t he going to be looking for a ride out of town? The state police said there was almost no one on the road. If Lynne got stubborn, and kept going when she shouldn’t have, and if they’re just about the only car on the road, they could come across that maniac and he’ll want their car.”

  Simon frowned. “Molloy’s not here yet? I thought you told me she was supposed to be here by six. We,” he said glancing toward Elise, “were going to take you two out to eat. Although after practically swimming over here from my dorm, I think we’ll have to settle for the cafeteria downstairs, gruesome though that prospect is.”

  “She was supposed to be here by six. I just wish I knew for sure that they’d stopped somewhere, a motel or something. Maybe she tried to call and couldn’t get through.”

  “It does seem like she’d have called to tell you where she is,” Elise said.

  “The phones are really bad. Some of the lines are down and even where they aren’t, there’s so much interference, you can’t hear the other person. I know because I just talked to Molloy’s mother.” Ernie forced a wan grin. “Nobody I’d rather be talking to when the line goes dead.”

  Simon laughed. But he was serious again almost immediately. “So, what are you going to do? About Molloy, I mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Ernie was a writer. He had a very vivid imagination. That imagination had dredged up a terrifying image of Molloy sitting in a car stranded in high water as some crazy maniac with wild eyes approached from behind. “But if I don’t do something, I’m going to go nuts! Any ideas?”

  “State police.”

  “Already called them. They said no reported accidents. So at least I know she’s not lying in some emergency room somewhere.” Ernie had resumed his pacing.

  Simon moved to stand behind Elise’s chair. “Maybe they’ve finally caught the guy. I’d kind of like to get a good night’s sleep, know what I mean?”

  “Wouldn’t have to be a guy,” Elise said, as if she were thinking aloud.

  “What?”

  “I said what makes you think it was a guy? Why couldn’t it have been a girl? I’m not Leo’s only female patient. There are others. Girls who saw him a lot more often than I did. Becca Turnbull, for one, and she acted like she hated him. And Corinne Summerson. She’s an athlete, and big enough and strong enough to bash in someone’s skull. Except I think she had a crush on Dr. Leo. She couldn’t wait to see him every day. Like Arthur.”

  Simon reached into an open box of cookies Ernie’s mother had sent, sitting on top of Ernie’s stereo. “I’ve been thinking about Arthur,” Simon said.

  Ernie stared at him. “Arthur? Arthur Banks?”

  Simon took a huge bite out of the cookie. “Um-hum. He’s pretty weird, Ernie. You gotta admit that. I mean, how many other guys do you know who wear suspenders even with shorts?”

  “We’re going to hang this guy on the basis of his wardrobe?”

  Simon shook his head. Cookie crumbs flew. “It’s not just that. He saw Leo every day, Ernie. He told us that, when I was talking about my allergy, remember? ‘I couldn’t function without Dr. Leo’s help,’ was what Arthur had to say. ‘A day without a visit to Dr. Leo would be a dark day for me.’ That’s actually what weird old Arthur said.”

  “Well, then, he certainly wouldn’t have killed him, would he, Simon?” Elise said tartly. “Arthur’s okay. He’s just … strange, that’s all.” She shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

  Impatient with them, Ernie said, “Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay? I have to find out where Molloy is. That’s all I care about right now.” He moved to the door, picking up his baseball jacket as he passed his bed. “I’m going to go talk to the police. I want to know what they’re doing to find that head case. And maybe they can help me find out where Molloy is.”

  Simon straightened up, pocketed several more cookies, and nodded. “Yeah, sure, Ernie. But can we eat first? My stomach is howling with hunger. A few more minutes won’t hurt, will it?”

  “You two go ahead. I’m not hungry.”

  “Okay if we come back up here and wait for you after we eat?” Elise asked. “I want to know what you found out.”

  “Sure. But you’ll have to wait in the hall, because I’m locking the door. Can’t have some crazy killer using my room as a hideout, can I?”

  The three separated on the ground floor, and as Ernie left the building he remembered what Simon had said. “A few more minutes won’t hurt.”

  Didn’t that depend on where Molloy was and what was happening to her?

  How many minutes had it taken for Dr. Leo’s head to be crushed?

  Chapter 12 />
  IN THE ATTIC AT Nightingale Hall, Toni was the first to cry out, “Oh, God, what happened to Lynne? Look at her head! She’s bleeding! Is she dead?” Her eyes darted frantically around the dark, cluttered attic, as if she expected someone to jump out from behind the boxes and trunks and furniture. Her voice hushed almost to a whisper, she said, “Someone is out there! Lynne didn’t cut herself on the wood-box. That blood we saw was from that awful wound on her head.”

  Looking dazed, Daisy nodded. “And she didn’t hit herself over the head and throw herself in this trunk. Someone else did.”

  They stood very close together, their eyes scanning the attic in dread, their breath coming in short, anxious gasps.

  “This is unreal,” Daisy said, staring down at Lynne. “How could someone have brought her into the house and up here without any of us hearing or seeing him? Up all those stairs …”

  “Oh, no,” Toni whispered, her hands clutching the edge of the trunk, “he’s in here! He’s in the house!” Words spilled out of her mouth as panic overtook her. “He’s not outside, he’s in here somewhere, with us, and there’s something wrong with him or he wouldn’t have done that to Lynne; he’s crazy, he’s got to be crazy! We don’t even know anyone here except Ernie, so anyone who would hurt Lynne for no reason has to be crazy! What are we going to do?”

  Molloy struggled to think. She couldn’t believe this was happening. What had they done to make someone so angry? How had they turned themselves into targets? They had only been looking for refuge from the storm. And the place had looked so deserted.

  But it wasn’t, was it?

  They had to get away from here. Nightmare Hall wasn’t safe, just as Ernie had told her. And they had to get out … fast He could be anywhere in the house. But first, they needed an ambulance. They couldn’t just leave Lynne lying in the trunk. Minutes had to count with the kind of injury she had.

  But the phones were out. What could they do? There had to be something. They couldn’t just leave Lynne lying there and not do anything. They didn’t even know if she was still alive.

  Bending, Molloy touched Lynne’s wrist. It was cool, and still damp. But it wasn’t cold, as she’d been terrified it would be. She applied more pressure to the wrist. “I think I feel a pulse,” she told Daisy and Toni. “Not very strong, though. It’s really slow, like it’s thinking about stopping any minute now. But at least she’s still alive.”

  “Are you sure?” Daisy said.

  “Yes. But we have to do something, fast.” Molloy, for lack of anything better to do, swept an old, faded blue chenille bedspread from its folded spot on a chair and spread it over Lynne. “We have to get help. Help for Lynne … and help for us.”

  “That cut on the side of her head looks nasty,” Daisy said. “Maybe we should try to clean it up. That might do her some good. I’ll run downstairs and get a wet washcloth.”

  “Daisy!” Toni shrieked, clutching the elbow of Daisy’s wine velvet dress. “You are not going down there alone! No one is. There’s someone in this house! Someone who did that,” pointing with a shaking finger at Lynne.

  “We don’t know that he’s in here. He could be gone by now,” Daisy said, without much conviction. “In fact,” her voice gathering strength, “I’ll bet anything he’s gone. Here’s what probably happened. He was hiding in the house for some reason—maybe he’s a homeless person and picked this place to get in out of the rain, just like we did. When we showed up, he decided to leave. Only when he went outside, Lynne surprised him by being at the woodbox. He panicked and hit her. Then he got scared, and decided to hide her so he’d have time to get away. Then he left.” She finished on a note of satisfaction.

  Toni, anxious to believe her, asked, “You really don’t think he’s still here?”

  “Nope. There was plenty of time for him to split before we locked the doors. Now they’re locked, so he can’t get back in even if he changes his mind.”

  “The back door into the kitchen isn’t locked,” Toni reminded her. “We didn’t have the key, remember? All we could do was put the chain on.” She drew in her breath, almost whispering, “Maybe he has the key. Maybe he can come and go as he pleases.”

  And that was when they all realized that the loose shutter had stopped banging against the house.

  Toni said it first. “The hammering … it’s stopped.”

  They listened.

  “But the storm hasn’t,” Daisy said uneasily, “so why isn’t that shutter still making a racket? I mean, if it was loose before, it’s still loose, right? So why isn’t it still slamming away out there?”

  They listened more intently.

  There was no hammering sound.

  “Maybe,” Toni said then, leaning against an upright trunk for support because the thought she was about to give voice to made her legs weak, “maybe that hammering wasn’t a loose shutter. Maybe it wasn’t even coming from outside.” The hand holding the flashlight dropped as if it could no longer carry the weight, and her words came out slowly, reluctantly. “Maybe … it … was … coming … from … inside.” She stared at Molloy and Daisy. “What if he’s been in here all along?”

  “He hasn’t,” Daisy said, clearly struggling to convince herself as well as them. “He can’t be. After he attacked Lynne, he’d get as far away from here as possible. Probably ran like the wind. It was a shutter we heard, and it’s just stopped banging, that’s all. He’s not still here, so just don’t say that.”

  “Whether he’s here or not,” Molloy said grimly, tucking the edges of the bedspread carefully under Lynne’s chin, “we have to figure out what to do. The phones are dead. Lynne needs an ambulance, but we can’t call one, and we can’t call the police, either. We can’t go outside because we don’t want to end up like Lynne. And we can’t start a fire in the fireplace so that someone will see the smoke and come running because we don’t have any wood.”

  “Well, we can’t stay up here all night, either,” Daisy said. “I don’t care what we do as long as we do something.” She glanced down at the trunk. “We don’t know how long Lynne can wait, either.”

  “We can’t just leave her up here,” Toni protested. “And we can’t move her. Someone has to stay up here with her until help comes.”

  A heavy silence filled the attic. Daisy and Molloy knew Toni was right. But sitting up here with their wounded friend, necessary though it might be, wasn’t going to get them away from Nightmare Hall, and it wasn’t going to get them any help, either.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Toni said suddenly, astonishing the other two girls. “You go ahead. Figure out what to do and do it, and I’ll stay up here with Lynne.”

  “You?” Daisy gasped tactlessly.

  “Daisy, I know you think of me as a whining, wimpy musician, but I think I can handle sitting with Lynne. And before you hand me any medals for bravery, I have to tell the truth. I feel safer up here, in this one room at the top of the house, than I would downstairs with all of those other rooms for someone to be hiding in.”

  “He’s not still here,” Daisy denied vehemently. “He’s not!” But her voice trembled.

  “You won’t leave me in the house alone, though, right?” Toni said anxiously. “I mean, you won’t suddenly decide to both go for help, will you? One of you will stay here and let me know what’s going on?”

  “We would never do that, Toni,” Molloy said. “And before we put you on guard duty, we’ll go down and get Arturo for you. Where’d you leave him?”

  “I had him with me until we started up the attic stairs. He’s right down there in the hall. That’d be great.”

  Toni grabbed at the violin case when they brought it to her as if it held all the answers. Clutching it, she huddled on the floor beside the trunk. “It’s awfully stuffy in here,” she complained. “I need air, and Lynne probably does, too. I’ll open a window.”

  “Okay,” Daisy said, “we’ll be back up as soon as we figure out how to get out of this mess.”

  Toni insiste
d they take the flashlight. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” she said. “And you’ve got the whole house to deal with. I know where everything is up here, and if I bump into a box or two, it won’t … hurt me.”

  Daisy and Molloy knew she had started to say, “It won’t kill me.”

  Daisy took an extra precious few minutes to take off the damp velvet dress and throw on an old blue coat she found hanging on a peg rack against one wall. Then, with one last check on Lynne, who was still breathing but hadn’t moved at all, Daisy and Molloy left the attic.

  On the third floor, Daisy said quietly, “I can’t believe someone carried Lynne into the house and all the way up to the attic without us knowing about it. How is that possible?”

  Molloy shrugged. She kept the flashlight aimed in front of them as they cautiously made their way down the stairs. “There has to be another staircase. A lot of old houses have back stairs. We should look for it. But first we have to figure out how to get help. That’s the first thing. I’m worried sick about Lynne. Her pulse was so weak.”

  “She’s not going to die, is she?” Tough, streetwise Daisy’s voice was quavering.

  “We won’t let her.” But Molloy sounded far braver than she felt. She hadn’t bought one word of Daisy’s scenario about Lynne’s attacker leaving the house. She wanted to believe it, more than she’d ever wanted to believe anything. But she couldn’t. That hammering had come from inside the house, she was sure of it. It would have been fainter if it had come from outside, with the sound battling against the noise of the storm. This sound had been sharper, more distinct.

  When they began moving down the main stairs to the second floor, they stopped talking, staying very close together. Molloy was slightly in the lead, still holding the flashlight. The house seemed to her darker and colder and more threatening. But she knew it wasn’t the house itself. It was what might be in the house.