The Coffin (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  “You’re not going to let go of this, are you?” Aidan asked as they climbed into the car.

  “Maybe I will,” Rachel said lightly, “and maybe I won’t. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well, in the meantime,” Aidan said, smiling, “can we please go to Vinnie’s? I’m not ready to be a starving artist. Not just yet.”

  Chapter 2

  “THE MASKS ARE FUN,” Aidan said around a mouthful of pizza, “and they’re what I do best. I tried oils and watercolors and pastels, but then I came across the life masks and knew that was something I could really sink my teeth into. Three of mine are hanging in the lobby. Did you see them?”

  Rachel shook her head. She’d been too fixated on the seascape. “I’ll look at them tomorrow. So, how do you make the masks?”

  “It’s easy.”

  Joseph hooted. “Oh, yeah, right, McKay. Easy for you.” To Rachel, he said, “I gave it up. Tried half a dozen times. Made such a mess, I almost got tossed out of class. Aidan’s being modest. Totally out of character for him, by the way. Must be trying to impress you.”

  “I am,” Aidan said. “So don’t ruin it, okay? Anyway,” he hunched forward, elbows on the Formica table, his eyes bright, “say you were the subject—and I really hope you’ll let me do one of you—you’d lie on a table with a cardboard tray under your head to catch any spills, and I’d coat your face and hairline with grease so the mask wouldn’t stick. Then I’d mix up the plaster, put straws in your nose so you could breathe, you’d close your eyes, and I’d pour the plaster over your face.”

  Rachel gasped. “Not my face, you wouldn’t! Are you serious? People let you do that to them?”

  “Well, it’s not like they can’t breathe, Rachel.” Aidan looked disappointed at her reaction. “Don’t forget about the straws. And it doesn’t take long for the plaster to harden. When I pull it off, I have a perfect mask of that person’s face.”

  “You do,” Joseph groused. “Not me. Mine never harden properly or they harden too fast, or the nose is sloppy. Once, I didn’t put enough petroleum jelly on a girl’s hairline before I poured the plaster. When I tried to take the mask off, her bangs were stuck. I had to cut them free with an X-Acto knife, or she’d have been walking around with a plaster mask on her face for the rest of her life. She was not a happy camper.”

  Paloma laughed. “She had the weirdest-looking hair on campus for a couple of weeks.”

  “Why would someone let you do that?” Rachel asked Aidan. “Cover their face with plaster? It sounds so horrible.”

  Annoyance was very visible on Aidan’s face. “It’s art, Rachel. They do it for art.”

  “And out of vanity,” Paloma said dryly. “You’d be surprised at how many people are willing, even eager, to be immortalized in plaster.”

  “You are going to let me do a life mask of you, aren’t you, Rachel?” Aidan asked. “Those cheekbones deserve to be cast in plaster for all the world to see.”

  “They can see them just fine, right here on my face,” Rachel. She didn’t want to make Aidan mad so soon in their relationship, if indeed he was interested in a relationship. But letting someone pour plaster over her face would take the kind of complete trust that Rachel wasn’t sure she was capable of.

  Changing the subject, she said, “So anyway, where do you work? I know it’s in the Fine Arts building, but where?”

  “On the tenth floor. It’s all studios. So are eight and nine. But I like the tenth. The light is better.”

  “You lug bags of plaster up ten flights of stairs?” No wonder he looked like he worked out regularly.

  Aidan shook his head. “There’s a dumbwaiter in the lobby. We just stick our stuff in there and haul it on upstairs with the pulley ropes.”

  Rachel was relieved Aidan had stopped pressing her about modeling for one of his masks. But she knew he’d ask again. He seemed determined.

  On their way out of Vinnie’s, they met Bibi, holding Rudy Sam’s hand and smiling. Unlike Rudy, who barely nodded as they passed in the entryway.

  What a creepy guy, Rachel thought. I myself wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley.

  Aidan walked her back to Lester. Before they parted she promised that she would return to the art exhibit the next day, Saturday, and view his life masks.

  “See you there,” he said, and turned to leave. But as he walked away, he called over his shoulder, “Think about doing one, okay? I’m ready whenever you are.”

  By that time, Rachel thought as she went inside, we’ll both be old and gray and any mask of me will be full of wrinkles.

  It had been a good day, and she was tired. Knowing Bibi wouldn’t be home until late, Rachel showered and went to bed. She was asleep before she had time to do as Aidan had asked and think about the mask.

  The young man in jeans and white T-shirt standing on the riverbank above the waterfall is tall and thin, with thick, windblown hair the color of carrots. His back and shoulders bend slightly over the fishing rod gripped firmly in his hands, and at his feet lies an open textbook. His eyes alternate between the textbook page and the fishing rod to see if he has a bite. He reads a little, then glances up to see if he’s got a bite, then reads a few more sentences before checking the rod again.

  He is situated closer to the waterfall than he’s ever been. Dangerous, someone has warned him, but Ted Leonides seldom pays attention to warnings of that sort. They are so like the ones his mother had given him repeatedly when he was little: “Don’t climb that tree, you’ll fall and break your neck,” “Wear your raincoat or you’ll catch pneumonia in this weather,” “Stay away from that old abandoned house or you’ll fall through the floorboards and break a leg.” He has never fallen out of a tree, never caught pneumonia, never broken a leg. Now, when people warn him away from things, he feels perversely drawn toward those things, trying to prove something. He isn’t sure to whom. His mother has been dead for eight years, so it couldn’t be her.

  Himself, maybe. Maybe he’s trying to prove something to himself.

  The forest surrounding this part of the riverbank is peaceful and quiet. No one ever comes up this far. The students at Salem University have been warned against the river in the spring and fall when seasonal rains transform the usually quiet, gentle waterfall into a thundering torrent lunging over the outcropping of rock into a raging whirlpool at the bottom.

  The fisherman lifts his head from the textbook pages to stare across the wild river to the other side, where the riverbank rises up into a steep, heavily wooded hill. It looks pretty over there. Maybe, when he’s memorized the eighteenth chapter in his physics book in preparation for a quiz the following day, and given up trying to catch anything in this wild and muddy water, he’ll walk back to the old railroad bridge behind campus and trek across it to the other side, to do some exploring.

  The bridge, too, is forbidden. Hasn’t been used in years. The metal supports are rusted and full of holes, the wooden cross ties rotting as if giant insects have been chewing on them.

  But he doesn’t weigh very much. Not going to bring down an entire bridge just walking across it. And it sure does look pretty on the other side of the river.

  He glances up at the sky. Looks like rain. Good fishing weather, but if he hangs around and waits for the rain, he’ll never get across the bridge to take a look.

  Deciding, he lays the fishing rod aside and bends to pick up his textbook.

  He never sees the figure that darts out of the woods, and straight at him from behind. Its hands are raised high in the air and hold an object … long, wooden, with a smooth, rounded end … a baseball bat.

  The figure, clothed in a long, black, flowing garment with a loose hood, swings the wooden object with both hands, connecting with the back of Ted Leonidas’s skull.

  He doesn’t make a sound. His body flies up and out, seeming to hang suspended in the air over the swollen river for long minutes before descending rapidly, limp as a rag doll, into the muddy, rushing water.

 
When he surfaces again, he is conscious, revived perhaps by the cold water. His eyes are wide with fear. His arms flail helplessly against the powerful current. His mouth is open in a silent scream of terror.

  That raw, open horror in his face is because Ted Leonides knows he is being swept straight toward the waterfall that plunges to the rocks below.

  And he knows there is nothing he can do to stop his helpless rush toward certain death.

  He is right.

  It takes only minutes.

  The figure in black on the riverbank, the bat dangling from its left hand, watches in satisfied silence as the young fisherman is swept away, arms still flailing, his mouth still open in a scream silenced by the muddy water pouring into it.

  As he is ripped backward toward the waterfall, his attacker tosses the bloody bat into the water. Then he turns and hurries along the riverbank to watch. He arrives at Lookout Point, the top of the hill where visitors come to view the waterfall, at the precise moment when the now-unconscious body is swept over the crest of the falls, spiraling down, down, amid the roar and rumble of the water, into the raging whirlpool and the jagged rocks below.

  This time, Ted Leonides doesn’t resurface.

  He is gone.

  The figure in black turns and hurries away, disappearing into the woods like a black shadow erased by the sun.

  Rachel awoke soaked with sweat and shaking so violently, the headboard of her bed was knocking against the wall.

  “What’s going on?” Bibi muttered. But she didn’t awaken. When Rachel didn’t answer, because shock and fear had rendered her incapable of speech, Bibi rolled over and fell silent again.

  Rachel shrank back against the wall, clutching the bedding to her chest. Her body was icy with sweat, her teeth chattering, her eyes as wide with terror as the eyes of the drowning victim.

  She knew that fisherman. Ted Leonides, from math. Tall, quiet in class, but she’d thought she’d noticed an adventurous look in his eyes.

  Why had she been dreaming about Ted Leonides? She hardly knew him.

  Rachel sat up, still trembling violently. She drew a tissue from the box on her night table and wiped her face with it. Her long nightshirt was soaked with sweat, and she was freezing, in spite of the mild breeze coming in through the window. She glanced at the illuminated alarm clock beside the tissue box. Five-thirty A.M. Campus was still dark, everyone else sensibly asleep.

  Only Rachel Seaver sat on the edge of her bed trembling and sick and frightened because of a bad dream.

  On shaky legs, she got up to change into a dry nightshirt, trying to still her thundering heart. It was only a dream, she told herself, as her grandmother would have done, and it’s over. You’re awake now, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.

  When she had changed into dry clothing, she crawled back into bed. But the dry T-shirt did nothing to warm her insides, which were still icy with fear.

  It had been so real, that nightmare. Unlike any she’d ever had before. And she’d had many, when she was young. After the sudden, shocking death of her parents in a taxicab accident while on vacation, she had moved into her grandmother’s big old, Victorian house. It was full of dark nooks and crannies and strange, unsettling sounds. Sleeping in the huge, drafty, second-floor bedroom at the end of a dark hallway, Rachel had suffered for a long time from night terrors that had kept her grandmother, who was wrestling with her own grief, up night after night.

  It had nearly undone both of them.

  But they’d got through it and come out on the other side, and after a very long time, the night terrors had ended.

  Until tonight.

  Again she wondered why she had been dreaming about Ted Leonides.

  Rachel had never seen anyone die, except on television and in the movies. She tried to tell herself that the nightmare was exactly the same thing. A dream was every bit as unreal as anything on film. More so, because at least on film, there actually were real people, actors, doing and saying what you were seeing. In a dream, not even that much was real.

  Telling herself that didn’t help. Because dream or not, she had seen Ted die. He had been hit on the back of the head by a horrible creature all in black, he had flown out over the water and then into it, and then she had watched him descend over the waterfall and onto the rocks below. She had seen the shock, the terror in his eyes, seen it as clearly as if she’d been standing on the riverbank as it happened.

  So it really was as if she had seen someone die.

  And he hadn’t died accidentally. That made it so much worse. He hadn’t just died, like someone who’d been sick for a long time, or, like her parents, in a car wreck. Someone had made it happen. Someone had killed him.

  Huddled deep within her blankets, Rachel shuddered again.

  That was when she remembered the painting, as if the shudder had shaken the sight of it back into her mind. The painting. The seascape at the exhibit. The drowning figure no one else had seen. In the painting, the figure’s arms were flailing, just as Ted’s had been in her nightmare. The eyes in the painting had been wide with fear, like his in her dream, the mouth open in that same terrible, silent scream.

  The painting. Was that why she’d had the nightmare? Because of that painting and what she thought she’d seen within its strokes of vivid green and brilliant blue?

  Rachel latched on to the thought as a possible, reasonable explanation for the nightmare. An explanation that made sense. Except … except that it didn’t explain why she had seen Ted Leonides in her dream. Why not someone she knew better? Or someone who had disagreed with her about what was in the painting, like that rude waiter? That would make more sense.

  Maybe dreams weren’t supposed to make sense.

  She lay there, eyes wide open, for a long time, trying to forget the nightmare, until a pale, silvery dawn crept in through the wide window.

  Finally, she drifted back into sleep. When she awoke a second time, the sun lit up the room and her digital clock read eight forty-five. Saturday morning. No classes for her. Rachel rolled over and would have returned to sleep if the door hadn’t opened to let Bibi in, armed with two steaming cups of coffee. She kicked the door closed behind her, but instead of bringing Rachel the coffee, she said in an odd voice, “Rachel,” and then backed up to her own bed and sank down on it as if her legs would no longer support her.

  Rachel pulled herself to a sitting position. Bibi’s cheeks were the same off-white as the wall behind her, and her eyes looked slightly glazed as she stared at her roommate. “Rachel?” she said again.

  “Bibi, what’s wrong?”

  Bibi’s large blue eyes moved to Rachel’s face. “You know that guy Ted Leonides?” she asked.

  Rachel’s heart stopped beating.

  Because she didn’t answer, Bibi mistook her silence for an inability to identify Ted Leonides. “The tall skinny redhead we see heading for the river sometimes with a fishing pole, remember?”

  Rachel struggled to find her voice. She finally managed to choke out, “What about him? What about Ted Leonides?”

  Bibi’s voice, when it came, seemed to Rachel to be miles and miles away, as if Bibi were trying to tell her something from the opposite end of a long, dark tunnel.

  “He’s dead, Rachel. He went fishing last night, and he fell over the waterfall and drowned in the pool at the bottom.”

  Buy Deadly Visions Now!

  A Biography of Diane Hoh

  Diane Hoh (b. 1937) is a bestselling author of young-adult fiction. Born in Warren, Pennsylvania, Hoh grew up with eight siblings and parents who encouraged her love of reading from an early age. After high school, she spent a year at St. Bonaventure University before marrying and raising three children. She and her family moved often, finally settling in Austin, Texas.

  Hoh sold two stories to Young Miss magazine, but did not attempt anything longer until her children were fully grown. She began her first novel, Loving That O’Connor Boy (1985), after seeing an ad in a publishing trade magazine request
ing submissions for a line of young-adult fiction. Although the manuscript was initially rejected, Hoh kept writing, and she soon completed her second full-length novel, Brian’s Girl (1985). One year later, her publisher reversed course, buying both novels and launching Hoh’s career as a young-adult author.

  After contributing novels to two popular series, Cheerleaders and the Girls of Canby Hall, Hoh found great success writing thrillers, beginning with Funhouse (1990), a Point Horror novel that became a national bestseller. Following its success, Hoh created the Nightmare Hall series, whose twenty-nine novels chronicle a university plagued by dark secrets. After concluding Nightmare Hall with 1995’s The Voice in the Mirror, Hoh wrote Virus (1996), which introduced the seven-volume Med Center series, which charts the challenges and mysteries of a hospital in Massachusetts.

  In 1998, Hoh had a runaway hit with Titanic: The Long Night, a story of two couples—one rich, one poor—and their escape from the doomed ocean liner. That same year, Hoh released Remembering the Titanic, which picked up the story one year later. Together, the two were among Hoh’s most popular titles. She continues to live and write in Austin.

  An eleven-year-old Hoh with her best friend, Margy Smith. Hoh’s favorite book that year was Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune.

  A card from Hoh’s mother written upon the publication of her daughter’s first book. Says Hoh, “This meant everything to me. My mother was a passionate reader, as was my dad.”

  Hoh and her mother in Ireland in 1985. Hoh recalls, “I kissed the Blarney Stone, which she said was redundant because I already had the ‘gift of gab.’ Later, I would use some of what we saw there in Titanic: The Long Night as Paddy, Brian, and Katie deported from Ireland.”

  An unused publicity photo of Hoh.

  Hoh with her daughter Jenny in Portland, Oregon, in 2008. Says Hoh, “While there, I received a call from a young filmmaker in Los Angeles who wanted to make The Train into a film. They ran out of money before the project got off the ground. Such is life.”