The Coffin (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  “Charlie!” she screamed, “Charlie, I’m in here, in the music room!”

  Continuing to pound and kick and shout, she turned her head sideways, glanced up at the camera, and saw Charlie reading the note the intruder had pinned to the mailbox. Her note, saying she was leaving to join her mother.

  It wasn’t her note. She hadn’t written it willingly. But would Charlie know that?

  Tanner stopped shouting, stopped pounding and kicking, and stood very still, her eyes on Charlie in the tiny screen. He looked like a miniature person and in the grayness of the screen, his wonderful dark eyes that she loved seemed colorless.

  “I didn’t write that, Charlie,” she muttered from between teeth clenched with tension. “You have to know I didn’t write that.”

  He must have read it a trillion times, it seemed to her. Just kept reading it over and over, didn’t even shake his head, just kept his eyes on that piece of paper, clearly unable to comprehend the words.

  “I don’t blame you, Charlie,” Tanner whispered, watching, holding her breath. “You just can’t believe that I would take off for Hong Kong or Japan or wherever without calling you first, and you’re right, I never would, never! So think about that, Charlie! Ask yourself why that note supposedly from me would be there when I would never do something so stupid.”

  Finally, Charlie did shake his head. He pulled the collar of his leather bomber jacket higher up around his chin, and gave his head another shake. He looked down at the note in his hands again. Looked up, at the front door, as if he expected it to open at any second and Tanner would be standing there, laughing and saying, “Gotcha!” Looked down at the note again. Began to turn slightly sideways …

  “No!” Tanner screamed at the top of her lungs, “No, Charlie, you can’t leave! Wait, don’t go! Oh, God, please don’t go! I don’t want to stay here alone. Please, Charlie, think about the note! It’s not true, you know it can’t be true, because I would never go and leave you without calling, I wouldn’t, you know that!”

  But as she stood there screaming, frantically waving arms at him that she knew he couldn’t see, he continued to turn away from the door. Then, still holding the note, he took a step forward, away from the house, then another and another.

  “No, Charlie, don’t, don’t go!” Tanner screamed, tears of frustration gathering in her eyes. “I’m here, I’m here, Charlie, oh, God, why can’t you hear me?”

  Charlie stopped, and for just one breath of a second, Tanner thought he might somehow have heard her. But instead of turning around, he began walking again.

  And although Tanner continued to shout as loud as she could, jumping up and down and waving her arms frantically, begging Charlie to wait, he continued on down the walkway until he was out of camera range and had disappeared from sight.

  With a loud, pained wail of defeat, Tanner sank to her knees on the soft, thick, turquoise carpet.

  Chapter 7

  TANNER DIDN’T KNEEL ON the carpet for long. The image of herself, crouching on the floor in tears, revolted her. And she couldn’t stand the thought that the intruder might return at any moment and find her in such bad shape. Whatever it was he was looking for with this crazy plan … satisfaction, he’d said, whatever that meant … she wasn’t about to give it to him so soon, like an early birthday present.

  She stood up, wiping her eyes on a bedraggled tissue she unearthed from the pocket of her sweatpants. Glancing at the German cuckoo clock above the fireplace, she saw with dismay that it was only one A.M.! Hours yet to get through before morning arrived. Hours!

  Oh, Charlie, why didn’t you hear me? she cried silently.

  The room had grown colder, and her bare feet felt as if she were standing on the frozen pond behind campus. She went into the tiny powder room, hoping for a nice, warm towel, but there were none. Only a handful of crisp paper towels, too small and stiff to substitute for socks.

  She cupped her hands under the faucet in the tiny sink, temporarily quenching her thirst. “I would kill for a toothbrush,” she said aloud, but had to settle for scrubbing her teeth with a dampened finger. A sound like distant thunder from her stomach reminded her that she was hungry, but the kitchen might as well have been a thousand miles away for all the good it did her.

  When she left the powder room, she told herself that the best way to make the night pass quickly was through sleep. If she lay down on the couch and closed her eyes, when she opened them again, it would be morning. Morning would surely bring help of some kind. Maybe the intruder had lied, and Silly was fine. She’d show up, bright and brash as always, and sooner or later, she’d discover Tanner locked in the music room and let her out.

  And if Silly wasn’t all right, if she really had had some kind of accident and didn’t show up at all, Charlie, at least, would be back. Charlie wouldn’t believe that note, not after he’d thought about it. He’d come back. He would. If she wasn’t sure of anything else in the world, she was sure of that much.

  Tanner lay down on the couch, but sleep was impossible. She kept listening for the sound of a key in the lock, telling her he had returned. She was cold, very cold. There was nothing in the room to use as a blanket. Her feet were like ice, even when she stretched the legs of her sweats down over her toes and tucked her feet underneath her. Unable to sleep, she was forced to think about her situation. Unreal, bizarre, but there it was. Time to face it.

  She was locked in a soundproof room. No food. Nothing to keep her warm as the night grew colder. Shouts for help wouldn’t do any good, and she couldn’t reach the windows to pound on them to attract the attention of a passerby. No telephone. No housekeeper. No father, no mom, no hope of getting out of here on her own …

  Tears of self-pity and fear stung Tanner’s eyelids.

  No, dammit! If her crazy captor ever did come back, he wasn’t going to find her with tear-swollen eyes. No way.

  She curled up into an armadillo-like ball on the narrow couch, and forced her eyelids shut.

  Fear and emotional exhaustion finally took their toll and by thinking about Charlie, which comforted her, Tanner managed to doze fitfully.

  The cuckoo had just struck the hour of six, semi-waking her, when the sound of the music room door being unlocked brought her fully back to consciousness. The skylight overhead revealed a dove-gray dawn. The room was as cold as a tomb. Shivering, hugging her arms around her chest for warmth, Tanner sat upright, her fear-widened eyes on the door.

  The ugly gray mask peered inside. “Rise and shine!” he said. “Sleep well?”

  “I slept fine,” she said defiantly. But she couldn’t stop shivering with cold. And fear, she had to admit. Her spine crawled at the sight of the repulsive rubber mask peering in at her.

  “What’s the matter,” he said as he entered the room, “you didn’t find all the comforts of home in here? Such a nice room. I guess it is a little chilly, though. Too bad.” He walked over to her and bent down, the grotesque rubber mask only inches from her face. “You’re not going to catch a cold, are you? That’s not part of my plan. Maybe I can dig up a blanket for you tonight. Can’t have you getting sick on me.”

  I’m not going to be here tonight, Tanner thought vehemently. I’m not spending another horrible night in this room.

  He had left the door ajar. But when her eyes swung over to it, so did his. He laughed. “Go ahead, give it a shot,” he challenged her. He straightened up to stand over her ominously. “Two bits I get there before you do. And then I’ll have to punish you for trying to get away.”

  Giving up, Tanner sank back into the couch.

  He laughed again. Then casually, like someone out taking a leisurely stroll, he sauntered over to the door and reached out into the hall, retrieving with one hand a long, narrow board and pulling it into the room. Dropping it on the floor at Tanner’s feet, he moved back to the door to haul in a second board. Then moving quickly back and forth from the doorway to the hall, he brought more boards into the room and piled them atop the others, until s
everal stacks of boards crisscrossed the turquoise carpet.

  The last load of boards he brought into the room was made up of shorter pieces of wood. These he piled on the leather chair.

  The last thing he lifted into the room and deposited on the floor was a red metal tool kit. Then he closed and locked the music room door again.

  Tanner watched the door swing shut with a sickening sense of hopelessness.

  Bending to open the lid of the tool kit, he took from it a large claw hammer and a plastic box. “Nails,” he said, waving the box at Tanner, who hadn’t moved from the couch. “Can’t put wood together without nails, right?”

  “What are you doing?” she asked, keeping her eyes on him. There hadn’t been one single moment when she could have made it through that doorway. He’d been right there the whole time, gathering in his pile of boards. “What is all that lumber for?” When she first saw what he was hauling inside, she’d thought he might be planning to build a fire in the fireplace to warm the room. But the boards were too big. Much too long. Taller than he was.

  “None of your business,” he said harshly, lifting one board and dragging it over into the middle of the room. Then he went back and got a second one.

  She watched as he nailed the two boards together, and then nailed a third and fourth to the first two. He was fast and efficient, wielding the claw hammer as if it weighed no more than an ounce or two. He set aside the first section, which was no wider than the music room door, and began nailing another group of boards together.

  “What are you doing?” Tanner cried again, when he had two narrow “walls” fastened together, had set them aside, and was beginning a third. “What is that?”

  “You’ll see,” he said grimly, and continued pounding.

  Tanner suddenly wasn’t at all sure she wanted Silly to show up. He wouldn’t like the interruption, and that claw hammer looked like it would make a nasty but very effective weapon. It wasn’t as if he’d never hit anyone on the head before. Tanner closed her eyes in pain at the thought of Silly being attacked, and had to quickly tell herself that her imagination was working overtime. Nothing like that could happen. It was too horrible.

  But what was he doing?

  “I’m hungry,” she said, hoping to distract him. He was working on a fourth section of boards. “I need something to eat. You said you didn’t want me to get sick. If you don’t feed me, I will get sick.”

  He continued to pound nails into the boards. “Later. Shut up.”

  Tanner sank back against the couch, trying to think. If he went out to the kitchen to get her something to eat, maybe he’d leave the hammer behind, and she could get her hands on it.

  But, she thought dismally, he’d never be that careless.

  The four sections were completed, lying in wait on the floor. Holding half a dozen long, heavy nails at a time between the lips of the rubber mask, he left one section lying on the floor while he attached one section at each side, creating a lidless “box.” Then, with the “box” still lying on its back, he moved a handful of shorter boards from the leather chair to the floor and used them to seal first one end of the “box” and then the other.

  It was such a bizarre sight, the figure in the green plaid flannel shirt wearing the gray, wrinkled, rubber mask, nails between its lips, the clumps of white hair bobbing as he hammered away, connecting the walls to each other, like someone fitting together the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

  She would never be able to describe this scene to anyone and expect them to believe it.

  Tanner watched intently. A box? He was making a box?

  She stopped breathing. A box … if it had had a lid, it would have looked exactly like …

  A coffin.

  No. No!

  Tanner’s heart felt as if it were sheathed in ice, and her hands were so stiff she couldn’t flex her fingers.

  Even when he stood the box upright, it still looked like a coffin.

  She didn’t want to think about why he would be constructing a coffin.

  While she continued watching with growing apprehension, he dragged the fourth wall over and attached that section not with nails, but with a set of large brass hinges.

  Now the structure looked like a tall, narrow, upright box with a door. Instead of a lock, which Tanner suspected would have taken too long to install, he simply took a short, very thick piece of wood from the tool kit and screwed it into the equally thick edge of one wall. When he twisted the chunk of wood sideways, it barred the door from opening every bit as effectively as a lock.

  The cuckoo clock struck the hour of eight. Tanner was astonished. She had been watching him work for two hours? Two hours?

  And Silly hadn’t arrived. Tanner was sure no one had come up the walk. There would have been movement on the screen. She would have noticed it.

  So he hadn’t been lying. Something had happened to Silly. An accident? What, she’d burned her arm on the oven? Slipped on a freshly mopped floor and thrown her back out? Cut her hand on a glass that broke when she was drying it?

  It had to be something like that. Couldn’t be anything worse.

  But how did he know about the accident, whatever it was? Had he been watching the house, like one of those stalkers that seemed to be constantly on the news lately? And seen Silly hurrying off to a doctor with her burned elbow or bleeding hand or bad back? Was that how he knew?

  Tanner’s hands felt clammy. “Tell me what that box is for,” she demanded. Only eight A.M. What time would Charlie come?

  She didn’t want him showing up while this crazy carpenter was still holding that vicious-looking claw hammer in his hand.

  “This is for you,” he said. He walked around in front of the box and the worm-like lips of his mask slipped upward. “Nice work, don’t you think? Considering the time constraints and all.”

  “For me?” Tanner, her face almost as gray as his mask, shrank further back into the couch. “It’s for me?”

  “Absolutely.” He pushed the chunk of wood straight up and pulled open the crude “door,” letting Tanner catch a glimpse of the interior. Small, so small. Not very wide, not very deep, only a few inches taller than he was. And dark. Small and dark.

  Just like a coffin.

  He swung the door shut and pushed the wooden bar down across it. “This is your Time Out booth,” he said cheerfully.

  “Time out?” Tanner stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Time out, time out,” he said impatiently, waving one hand at her, “haven’t you ever heard of time out? Weren’t you ever disciplined as a kid? Didn’t you have to go sit in a corner? Weren’t you ever sent to your room to think about your misdeeds?”

  Her mother hadn’t been much of a disciplinarian. No cookies for a week, that was about as tough as her mother got.

  “Well,” he continued, this time more patiently, “this is where you’re going to go when you do something wrong.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” he shouted angrily. His voice sounded, then, vaguely familiar. “Quit questioning everything I say! Why don’t you just listen? When people don’t do as they’re told, they have to have time out.”

  Tanner’s jaw dropped.

  “If you do what I say, if you’re good as gold,” he continued, “you won’t have to go in there. But if you give me any trouble at all,” he spread his hands helplessly, “well, I’ll have no choice.” He gave the door of the box a gentle kick. “I’ll have to see to it that you’re properly disciplined. So!” he cried cheerfully, “we’re all set!” And dropping the hammer back into the open toolbox, he plopped into the leather chair.

  Although she couldn’t see it, Tanner was convinced that a huge smile of satisfaction lit the face under the mask.

  She sat up very straight on the couch. “I’m not going into that thing,” she said with false bravado. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’m not going in there. And you can’t make me.”

  She was
sorry the minute the words left her mouth, but it was too late.

  In one eye-blinking instant, he was out of the chair and in front of her and grasping her sweatshirt with one fist while the other fist yanked on her hair. She cried out in pain, but he was already dragging her over to the box. Yanking the door open. Pushing her inside, face first.

  The door slammed, taking the little bit of light with it, and Tanner heard the heavy chunk of wood being angrily flipped into place.

  She was inside the tall, narrow coffin.

  And she was locked in.

  Chapter 8

  AT THE SIGMA CHI house, Charlie Cochran’s roommate, Mark, awakened to find Charlie sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, holding a piece of paper in his hands.

  “Geez, Charlie, you look like hell!” Mark said, dragging himself upright. “Whatsamatter, somebody die?”

  Charlie didn’t answer. He’d been awake all night, not even attempting to lie down and close his eyes. He’d alternated throughout the night between pacing the room or sitting on his bed or standing at the wide window overlooking a darkened campus brightened only by the walkway lamp posts and a few random lights still on in other houses along fraternity row. And he had read and reread the note signed with Tanner’s name, struggling to understand what it meant, as if he were trying to decipher a message written in code.

  Mark rubbed his eyes. “What’s wrong, Charlie?” He was awake now, and the sight of his normally easygoing roommate, hair askew, clothes rumpled, unsettled Mark. The planet had to be off its axis if Charlie Cochran hadn’t slept like a baby. “Something happen to Tanner?”

  Charlie looked over at Mark as if realizing for the first time that he wasn’t alone in the room. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. Then he got up, scooped his jacket off the bed, and left the room.