by John Saul
Bettina gave her a rueful smile. “That’s what I figured. Did she call me a witch?”
Sarah flushed, looked down again, but nodded.
“You’re not going to tell me you believe in witchcraft, are you?”
Sarah decided this had to be the most uncomfortable conversation she’d ever had. “I guess not,” she whispered, her eyes on the table in front of her.
“Good,” Bettina said. “I just wanted to set the record straight. You have a lot of talent, and I’d hate to see it wasted because of what people say about me.”
Sarah’s head came up, and the face she saw was hardly that of some kind of witch, but a perfectly normal one, with soft eyes and a kind smile. Why on earth would anyone talk about this woman the way the Garveys had?
As if she’d read Sarah’s mind, Bettina Philips began answering her unspoken question. “I live in an old mansion called Shutters that’s seen better days. A lot of better days. So naturally all the kids say it’s haunted. It isn’t, of course, but it was built a hundred and fifty years ago, and my family has lived in it for generations.”
Her gentle smile broadened into a grin. “But living in a haunted house is just the beginning. I’m also ‘different.’” She pronounced the word in a way that turned it from a simple adjective into an insult. “I’m an artist,” she went on, and then her voice dropped so it sounded almost conspiratorial. “But it’s even worse than that: I’m also interested in tarot cards and astrology and all kinds of religions, especially the more mystical ones. I’ve studied the medicinal properties of various herbs, and grow them in my garden. And worst of all, I don’t go to church, and in Warwick that alone would make me suspect. I also don’t lunch with the ladies, or serve on the right committees, or attend the right fund-raisers. I also tend to dress the way I please, and mind my own business. All of which, as I’m sure you would have come to find out even if Angie Garvey didn’t tell you so, makes me different. In fact, I’ve always been different, even when I was your age.”
She paused, and Sarah suddenly understood exactly what Bettina Philips was saying: that when she herself was a student at this school, she was the one everyone whispered about and laughed at. When Bettina had been her age, it was probably Angie and Mitch who sat in the cafeteria making fun of the girl who wasn’t quite like them.
“And here’s the best part, Sarah,” Bettina said, moving to a chair on the opposite side of the art table. “Those same people who are always gossiping about me are the ones who always come to me when they’re in trouble. Would you believe it? They actually come and knock on my back door and ask to have their fortunes told.”
Sarah stared at her. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Bettina repeated. “And I do my best for them. I’m nice to them. I lay out the tarot cards and try to tell them what I think they want to hear, and they go away grateful. Sometimes they come to me for herbs, thinking I might have some magical potions. And often my herbs work for them, but it’s not because of any magic—it’s just that I know what I’m doing with medicinal herbs.”
“Does Angie Garvey come to see you?” Sarah whispered.
Bettina shrugged. “I never say who comes to see me. The point is that you shouldn’t listen to the rumors. You’re fourteen years old and smarter than most of the kids around here. So when you hear things about people, you should weigh all the evidence and make up your own mind about them.”
“Except,” Sarah reminded her, “that I still have to live with the Garveys.”
“Very true,” Bettina agreed. “And I certainly don’t want to cause you any trouble. I just didn’t want to lose you as a student because of what amounts to nothing more than medieval nonsense. And I don’t want you doing the bare minimum to get by in my class, either. I see exceptional promise in your talent, and I think I can help you hone your skills.”
Sarah smiled. “I’d like that.”
“Me, too,” Bettina said, pushing back from the table. “But I can’t do it if you’re afraid of me. So have a nice evening and I’ll see you tomorrow.” The teacher turned back to her desk and began shuffling a stack of class drawings into a zippered portfolio.
Sarah picked up her backpack and left the art studio, suddenly feeling better than she had in a long, long time.
Nick Dunnigan was in love.
At least he was pretty sure it was love as he moved down the hallway toward the school’s front doors. After all, what else could it be? He felt sort of light-headed and had a sort of hollow feeling in his stomach, and just thinking about sitting across from Sarah Crane in the cafeteria not only made his heart start to pound but also plastered what he knew must be a really stupid-looking grin across his face. Until lunchtime, he’d had no idea, really, what love was, but now he knew.
It made you happy, and it made you want to dance, and it made you feel funny.
But most of all, you knew you had someone you could trust.
Someone you could tell everything to. Absolutely everything.
How could it have happened so quickly?
And how was it that when Sarah Crane was close to him, his voices went quiet?
Profoundly quiet.
Unimaginably, astonishingly, joyfully quiet, as if she had the same effect on them that she did on him. They hadn’t even objected when he started telling her about the hallucination. And that was weird, too—he never talked to anyone about the hallucinations except his mother and the doctors. But today he’d been able to tell Sarah Crane about it and she hadn’t laughed or made fun of him.
He pushed through the heavy doors into the crisp outside air and paused on the steps. Maybe he should wait for Sarah and walk her home. But what if she didn’t want to walk with him? What if she’d thought about what he told her at lunch and decided he was crazy?
He didn’t even want to think about that possibility, and suddenly the whole idea of waiting for her seemed stupid.
Really, really stupid. How was a girl as beautiful and nice as Sarah Crane going to feel the same way about him that he felt about her? Taking the steps two at a time down to the sidewalk, he turned right, then headed diagonally across the football field toward home, his footsteps crunching on the nearly frozen grass.
He was passing the bleachers on the far side of the field when a movement from under the seats caught his eye. Then he heard a voice that made his stomach clench.
Conner West.
Conner got away with everything because his father ran the Warwick police department, which consisted of three deputies, including Conner’s dad.
“Hey,” Conner said.
Before Nick quite realized it had happened, Conner and two of his friends had surrounded him, and the euphoria of the hours since lunch drained out of him in an instant.
He was back to being crazy Nick Dunnigan.
“So the lunatic has a girlfriend, huh?” Conner said, his lips twisting into a sneer. “What do you think it’d be like, screwing a crip?”
Bobby Fendler edged closer and leered at Nick. “At lunch we thought you two should have gotten a room.”
“Gonna go find someplace to make out now?” Elliot Nash chimed in. “You and the gimp?”
The voices in Nick’s head roused from their silence, gabbling angrily among themselves.
“Can we watch?” Conner demanded. “It’d be neat watching Lunatic Nick try to stick it into his gimpy girlfriend.”
“Oh, God, I could puke just thinking about it,” Elliot said, clutching his belly and bending over as if about to vomit all over Nick’s shoes.
“Their kids would all be hunchback psychos,” Conner said, jabbing at Nick’s chest.
Nick stood perfectly still. They’d get bored in a few minutes and leave him alone.
They always did.
But then the committee in his head began howling at him to fight back, to lash out at them, punching, gouging, kicking, even biting and clawing at them until they were lying in the street, writhing in agony, bleeding and dying. The howling rose
until the voices were so painful, he felt like his head was about to blow up, and something was happening to his eyes, too.
Now he could barely see Conner and Elliot and Bobby.
“Quiet,” Nick cried out, his voice choking. “Be quiet. Please be quiet.”
“Be quiet?” Conner said, jabbing him in the chest again. “You don’t tell me to be quiet. Get it?”
A blaze of agony exploded in Nick’s brain, and his vision abruptly cleared.
The flesh of Conner’s face was falling away in strips as blood ran down his neck and dripped onto the ground.
Elliot burst into flames, his mouth wide-open in a scream drowned out by the demons in Nick’s head. “Stop!” Nick yelled. “Stop it!”
“Shut up, loser!” Bobby Fendler shoved Nick hard to punctuate his words.
Now pieces of Bobby were flying off as if caught in some great wind, hanging like gory Halloween decorations in the naked branches of the leafless trees.
Meanwhile, Elliot Nash still burned, his flesh melting off his bones.
And Conner West’s tongue hung by a thread, flapping grotesquely with every word he spoke.
“Quiet!” Nick screamed, suddenly lashing out, flailing at the air around him with a viciousness that made all three of his tormentors step back. “Leave me alone! I don’t want to see this anymore!”
“Hey, cool it,” Conner said. “We haven’t done anything to you.”
Conner’s voice sounded like nothing more than warbling static to Nick, whose head felt like it would burst with the pressure of the shrieking voices he was hearing and the horrors he was seeing, even when he clamped his eyes shut. Now he put his hands over his ears and began turning slowly around. “Please, please, please,” he said, turning ever faster until he was whirling violently, as if under the impetus of some unseen force.
“Jeez,” Conner whispered, grasping Elliot Nash’s elbow. “Let’s get outta here—I think Nick’s about to take a dive over the edge for good.”
“Crazy,” Bobby Fendler said, but couldn’t resist a final shove at the spinning boy.
Nick lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, and his three tormentors stepped back, glancing around to see who might have been watching the scene on the football field. Then, seeing no one, they turned and fled.
Nick covered his head with his arms and pleaded in a choked voice that seemed lost in the cacophony of the demons in his head who were still screaming for their revenge.
The voices finally calmed.
Nick sat up, groped in his backpack for his knit cap and put it on his head, pulling it down to cover his freezing ears.
From the corners of his eyes he thought he could still spot scraps of Elliot Nash caught in the twigs of the trees, and for a moment he thought he saw blood still running in rivulets in the gutter in front of the bleachers.
But he could see real things again, too. Only a few steps away from the football field were houses and the sidewalk, and after a few blocks he would be home.
He stood up, brushed the dirt and gravel from his pants, and started homeward.
Her backpack stuffed with more books than she would have thought she could carry, Sarah paused on the sidewalk outside the school and looked around for Nick. They hadn’t actually talked about meeting up after school, and even if he’d hung around waiting for her, she was late because of her meeting with Miss Philips. Still, when she didn’t see him, she felt a pang of disappointment that was almost as painful as the twinge that went through her hip with every step she took.
Well, maybe tomorrow.
She started along the sidewalk and was just passing one of the gift shops in the middle of the block on Main Street that faced the village square when something in the window caught her eye. It was a large—and way too colorful—map of Warwick, with all the historic buildings and churches prominently displayed, if not quite as prominently as the Chamber of Commerce-affiliated businesses that had contributed to the creation of the map.
She stopped to study it more carefully, located the high school, the Garveys’ house, and, of course, the shop in front of which she stood. At the edge of the map was the prison that held her father. And just a mile from where she was, on the shores of Shutters Lake, she saw something else.
The site of an old prison, which had apparently been replaced by the new one.
Sarah cocked her head, eyeing the small drawing of what had once been the warden’s mansion and was all that was left of the prison.
She cocked her head, looking at the drawing more closely as she realized it sort of resembled the house she’d drawn in art class.
The house she’d only seen before in the nightmares that sometimes haunted her. She frowned. The resemblance was definitely there, but how many big old stone houses were there in New England? Hundreds? Probably thousands. And in one way or another, they’d all have some similarities.
Then another thought occurred to her: Could that be the house Bettina Philips lived in?
Deciding the exercise would be good for her leg, she concentrated on the map, memorizing the streets that would take her to the old prison site. When she was certain she wouldn’t get lost, she set off down the sidewalk, came to the end of the block, and turned north. Then as the streetlights suddenly came on, she hesitated. But the sun was still shining and it wasn’t very far.
She had time.
Fifteen minutes later Sarah gazed up the long curving driveway that led toward Shutters. Ornate, rusted wrought-iron gates hung crookedly on their hinges, entwined with frost-covered bindweed. She shrugged out of her backpack and let it fall to the ground, then stretched her sore shoulders.
Gates were meant to keep people out. If she went farther, would she be trespassing?
But they weren’t closed, so maybe Miss Philips didn’t mind if people came up her driveway. Besides, she’d only walk far enough to get a look at the house.
She stashed her heavy book bag behind the gate and walked slowly up the drive, which turned out to be longer than she’d expected.
And then, as she came around one more crook in the drive, there it was. Bettina was right: it really did look abandoned. Its shutters hung as crazily as the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of the drive, and the gutters around the eaves drooped loosely, some of them hanging so far away from the roof they couldn’t have caught any water at all.
And all of them were bent and rusted.
Stones were missing from the walkways, and a big fountain in the front looked like no one had cleaned it out in decades.
The place really did look haunted.
Haunted, and strangely familiar.
Sarah closed her eyes and pictured the art paper on her table and the brown pastel crayon.
She saw the image of a stone house, with an intricate roofline complicated by gables and shadows.
She opened her eyes and there it was, standing before her. Shabbier than she had drawn it, but still the same house.
A shiver crept up her arms, then the skin on her back was crawling, too.
She should leave before Bettina Philips looked out a window and saw her trespassing.
Then a black dog, the fur around its neck up and its head lowered, slunk around the corner of the house and crouched low to the ground, staring at her.
Sarah froze. The last thing she needed was to be confronted by a watchdog. If it jumped at her, she wouldn’t be able to fend it off before it knocked her over.
Now it started down the driveway toward her, moving very slowly, the strip of fur along its spine still raised, its head still lowered.
Sarah stood quietly, her breath loud in her ears, her heart pounding.
They both heard the slam of a car door, and the dog, startled, crouched, took one last look at her and vanished into the woods as quickly and silently as if it had never been there at all.
A car engine started.
Sarah stepped off the driveway and into the shadowy trees. The sun, very low in the sky now, shone right on the driver’s face,
and Sarah saw her clearly as the car passed her. It was a lone woman, her hair bound severely to her head, but smiling as if she’d just heard something good.
Was this one of the gossiping women from town who passed rumors about Bettina Philips, then came to her for advice?
Sarah waited until the car disappeared around the first curve in the driveway, then emerged from the shelter of the trees and took one last look at the house.
Suddenly she wished she could see the inside. She could hardly even imagine how Bettina lived in that enormous house. Did she live there all alone or at least have some pets? Were the furnishings in as bad shape as the house itself?
A thin line of smoke now trailed out of one of the chimneys. Dusk was coming on, and Bettina Philips was building herself a fire.
Sarah realized she’d have to walk quickly to get home before dark and even then would have to tell Angie Garvey something about where she’d been.
The library—that was it. She’d just say she went to the library, and to keep it from being a lie, she’d actually stop there on her way home. And she wouldn’t say a word about Bettina Philips.
Not one word.
Chapter Nine
Sarah made her way along the frozen sidewalk as fast as she could, the cold of the Sunday morning making her hip ache with every step as she tried to keep up with the Garveys. Yet even walking as fast as possible, the family was well into the next block by the time she turned the corner and the Mission of God church came into view.
Sarah stopped dead in her tracks.
An icy chill—far colder than that of the late fall morning—filled her body as she gazed at the building that proclaimed itself the house of God.
But if it truly was God’s house, why did she feel an overwhelming sense of darkness and evil as she beheld the simple frame building adorned only by a tall steeple spiking into the sky?