by Diane Hoh
Candie shrieked and bent to swat at the invaders.
Something moved in Maxie’s hair. Stomping her feet to shake the creatures from her feet, she lifted a hand to her head. Her hand came away covered with ants.
She screamed. Her head came up, her eyes darted toward the ceiling, and she screamed again. The surface overhead was covered with moving black trails.
She wanted to run, but she couldn’t. Her legs seemed frozen in place.
They’re just ants, she tried to tell herself, but it was no use. There were so many.
Something moved in her hair again.
Her legs thawed, and reaching down to yank Candie upright, Maxie ran for the door, dragging Candie with her.
The door was closed.
“I didn’t close the door,” Maxie gasped, reaching for the doorknob, “did you?”
“No! Open it, hurry!”
It was darker by the door, the light not quite reaching. Maxie, one hand shielding the top of her head, reached with her other hand for the doorknob. Her fingers closed around soft, living things, and she screamed.
“They’re on the knob,” she gasped, yanking the hem of her skirt upward to swat furiously at the doorknob. “They’re all over it!”
Candie reached out a hand to help Maxie swat, and when the doorknob seemed free of crawling insects, Maxie yanked on it. Hard.
It didn’t open.
“Oh, God, they’re falling into my hair!” Candie cried, batting at her head with both hands. “Maxie, get the door open!”
The knob turned under Maxie’s forceful grip, but the door remained stubbornly closed.
“Pound on it!” Candie shrieked, “pound!”
They both began pounding with their fists, and shouting, “Help! Open the door, hurry!”
Footsteps outside the pantry, then the door was pulled open, and Erica stood there, staring at them and saying, “What on earth … ?”
Maxie and Candie, their hands still protectively reaching for their hair, fell out into the kitchen.
Erica alerted the rest of the house to this new, latest emergency. Tinker tried to calm down Maxie and Candie, both trembling and white-faced. Then several other girls in the house, including Cath Devon, attacked the pantry with rolled-up newspapers, brooms, and cans of spray insecticide.
“I don’t understand,” Mildred said in a bewildered voice when the pantry was finally relatively free of pests. She leaned against the kitchen counter. “We have never had ants in this house. And the exterminator was just here in February, checking. There was no sign of an ant colony then. He would have said something. “ She sighed heavily. “I’ll have to call him first thing tomorrow morning.”
“There weren’t any ants in there when I went in earlier,” Erica said firmly. “I would have noticed.”
Maxie and Candie, both still white-faced, exchanged a glance. “Tuttle was in there,” Maxi said hoarsely. “Earlier. Before us.”
“Tom?” the housemother said blankly. “Yes, I know. But … you don’t think … ? Oh, Maxie, that’s ridiculous. Why would Tom … ?”
Maxie shrugged. “He doesn’t like us. Any of us. Haven’t you noticed?”
Cath Devon, standing quietly in a corner, her face as pale as Maxie’s, said hesitantly, “He’s not dangerous, is he? I mean, he wouldn’t really hurt anyone, would he?”
Maxie guessed that Cath was remembering the weird, disturbing things that had gone on when she’d lived at Nightmare Hall. She must feel right now like she’d jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
Hastening to reassure Cath, Mildred said quickly, “No, of course not. Tom’s an old crank and more than a little paranoid, I suppose, but he’s never given me any reason to believe he would ever harm anyone.”
Not yet, Maxie thought.
It seemed too much of a coincidence to her that they’d discovered Tom Tuttle in the pantry right before they discovered the ants.
“Was anyone else in the house today who doesn’t belong here?” she asked Mildred. Then she remembered. “Except for that doctor, I mean?”
Mildred looked blank. “What doctor?”
“The one whose car broke down. Big man, graying hair, handkerchief over his bloody nose? He needed to use the phone.”
“Maxie, you let a stranger into the house? With everything that’s been happening?” Erica demanded.
Maxie flushed. “He was a doctor. Had his black bag with him. He was on his way to the infirmary for a consultation. Besides, he was hurt. I couldn’t very well just let him stand there on the front porch bleeding, could I? He was on the phone when I left. You didn’t see him?”
“No, I didn’t see the man,” Mildred said.
“That must have been when I was out back talking to Tom about the peephole and the chain lock. When I came back inside, the house was empty.”
“His name was Clark,” Maxie said. “Michael Clark.” Desperate to be sure that she hadn’t done anything foolish or dangerous, she ran to the phone and dialed the infirmary.
And was told a moment later that no Dr. Michael Clark had been expected there for a consultation or anything else.
“I don’t believe it,” Maxie said when she’d hung up. “I never should have let him in. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“Who was this person?” Candie asked, a bewildered look on her face. “If he wasn’t really a doctor, who was he and what was he doing here?”
“I don’t know who he was,” Maxie answered, “but has it crossed anyone’s mind that his black bag could have been filled with … ants?”
A heavy silence followed her words.
“Mrs. B.,” Maxie said shakily. “I think we need to call the police.”
“No!” Erica cried. “Come on, Maxie, it was just ants! No one was hurt. It was a joke, a gag, a prank … maybe one of the other sororities did it. The police will laugh at us if we call them and tell them you were trapped in the pantry with a bunch of ants.”
“Anyway,” Candie reassured Maxie, “Mildred just said, Tuttle’s going to put a chain lock on and a peephole in. So what happened today can’t happen again, right?”
Maxie gave in reluctantly. She didn’t like the idea of police officers invading Omega house any more than anyone else did. But the uneasy feeling in her stomach remained.
“What about the ceremony?” Tinker asked no one in particular. Turning to Cath, she asked, “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
Cath laughed softly, the color returning to her face. “No, I haven’t changed my mind, Tinker. Anyway,” she added more soberly, “compared to what we went through at Nightmare Hall, ants are nothing.”
Erica and Mildred put their heads together to figure out what to serve after the ceremony, assuming that most of the boxes in the now closed and locked pantry were ant-infested. When they had settled on ordering out for Chinese from Hunan Manor in town, preparations began again for Cath’s wall-walk.
There wasn’t that much to prepare. Tinker checked to make sure there was no debris lying on the top of the low brick wall. Maxie turned on the overhead lanterns strung across the lawn, while Candie and Erica sat down on the back porch and went over the routine, Cath’s blindfolded walk around a low fountain wall.
Maxie was replacing a burned-out bulb in one of the lanterns when she spotted movement in the thick, tall bushes off to her left, and heard a scuttling sound. Normally, she would have dismissed the sound as a wandering cat or dog, maybe a squirrel out for a late-evening forage.
But not now.
She climbed down from her ladder and moved closer to the bushes. “Is anybody there?” she called. Candie, Cath, and Erica looked up from their bench on the porch.
“Maxie?” Erica called, standing up. “What’s the matter?”
There was no answer from the bushes. Not a leaf moved, and the scuttling sound was gone.
I’m freaking, Maxie told herself, turning away. There isn’t anybody there, and there never was. If I’m not careful, I’ll be seeing littl
e green men in the shadows any second now.
But she saw again the long, thick trail of ants moving across the ceiling, dropping into her hair, and began to tremble. Someone had deliberately brought those ants in from outside.
Probably in a doctor’s black medical bag.
Why would someone do that?
When everything was ready, the girls gathered around the fountain under the softly glowing lanterns.
While Erica wrapped a thick, soft white cloth around Cath’s eyes and tied it at the back of her head, Tinker put an audiotape into a portable cassette player. The sound that came out when she switched it on was an eerie, haunting melody played on an organ.
Horror movie music, Maxie thought to herself. Erica helped Cath up onto the low brick wall surrounding the empty concrete fountain, and the other girls formed a wide circle around the edges.
“Catherine Devon,” Erica intoned in an unnaturally deep voice, “complete the circle once without faltering, and you will prove your courage and determination. This you must do for your sisters. If you succeed, we will pledge to you our eternal loyalty, as you pledge yours to us.”
Cath lifted her arms straight out from her shoulders for balance and took one faltering step, then another. A light breeze ruffled her dark hair as she became more sure of her footing and began to move with confidence around the low brick wall. The music in the background filled the cool night air.
Maxie recalled her own walk, and the relief she’d felt at the end when the other sisters had removed her blindfold and hugged her, officially welcoming her to the group. Now she enjoyed the ritual again. She and Tinker on one side and Candie on the other joined hands. After dinner, she would call Brendan. Maybe they could get together that night. But she probably wouldn’t tell him about the ants … not just yet, anyway. He’d given her a hard time about the things being stolen. Better not give him any more fuel for his argument that she should flee back to Lester.
That night, out there on the lawn under the glowing lanterns, joining hands with her sisters as they made room for a new member, she felt more at home than she ever had in the dorm.
This was the best place to be.
Until Cath fell.
Perhaps because she’d been thinking about Brendan, Maxie couldn’t be sure exactly how it happened.
One minute, Cath was walking lightly, agilely, along the brick wall, and the next minute, one ankle turned sharply, she let out a soft “Ooh” and teetered slightly, her arms struggling to maintain an even balance. And then, realizing she was losing the battle, she gasped. A second later, she toppled heavily sideways.
But in the wrong direction. Had her body tipped to the right, she would have fallen onto the soft, thick grass, and been uninjured.
Instead, she fell to the left, into the fountain.
The empty fountain, with no cushion of water to soften the impact.
There were gasps, and then screams and shouts of horror, as Cath toppled off the wall and headed straight for the bare cement lying at the bottom of the fountain.
She tried to catch herself as she fell, and so her right arm smacked into the cement first. She screamed once, and then her head slapped against the fountain floor with a sharp crack. Cath let out a startled pained grunt before her eyes closed and she went totally limp, her right arm twisted at a strange angle beneath her.
As she lay there, as still as death, the eerie music played on.
Chapter 9
IT WAS ERICA WHO leaped into action first. Shouting to Candie to run and phone for an ambulance, she jumped into the fountain to see to Cath, who lay like a broken doll on the hard stone floor.
“She’s alive,” Erica called up to the others, who were still standing in a circle, hands over their mouths, their eyes wide with shock. “She’s breathing. Someone go get a blanket.”
Two more people ran to the house. One of the seniors in the group said in a voice hoarse with shock, “Nothing like this has ever happened before. How could this happen?”
“She fell,” someone else said. “She just fell. That’s all.”
Maxie thought, No, she didn’t. She didn’t just fall. Not Cath. She’s too light on her feet, too agile. And the wall isn’t that narrow. We wouldn’t have sent her out there if it were.
This was no simple accident. Maxie was convinced of that.
Which was why, when Cath had been taken away in a shrieking ambulance and the other girls had retreated to their rooms to talk in hushed whispers about the accident, Maxie went back outside and approached the brick wall.
Flashlight in hand, she circled the wall on her hands and knees, poking and prying at the layers of bricks with her free hand.
She found what she was looking for halfway around, at the exact spot where Cath had toppled and fallen. The bricks were all in place, so that at first glance it looked as if nothing were wrong. But when Maxie’s hand reached out and poked, the top layer of bricks wobbled. When she poked further, they shifted and slid, and the layer beneath slid as well.
No wonder Cath had fallen. Her own footing had been certain, but the surface on which she was walking was unbalanced. The top two layers of brick were loose.
Maxie played the flashlight’s beam across the ground beneath the wall. At its base, small clumps of dried gray mortar lay scattered randomly, like wads of discarded chewing gum.
Her eyes returned to the wall. Zeroing in on the bricks with the light, she could see faint scratch marks in the thin layer of mortar still in place. Clear evidence that someone had been digging. Tampering with the bricks. Deliberately.
Maxie sat back on her heels, a cold feeling of dread sweeping over her. Someone had known about the wall-walk. Someone had come out here and dug the mortar from between the bricks, hoping that Cath would fall. Without water in the fountain, there was no question that the person walking along the wall would be seriously hurt if she fell in that direction instead of onto the grass. The only question at all was which way she might fall, and apparently whoever had removed the mortar was willing to take that risk.
The risk had paid off. Cath Devon was lying in a hospital bed, probably with an injury to her spine.
Maxie heard again the sharp, sickening crack as Cath landed on her back in the fountain. Her stomach rose in protest. How much damage had that hard, unyielding cement done to Cath’s spinal column?
They wouldn’t know that until tomorrow.
Getting up slowly, as if she had suddenly aged a great deal, Maxie went back inside.
The atmosphere inside Omega house was dismal. Quiet. No music. No loud, excited chatter, normal after a wall-walk. In the dining room, the dishes Mildred had placed on the table sat empty, the candles unlit.
No one would feel like eating now.
Erica wasn’t in her room. And a knock on Mildred’s, door brought no answer. The news about the wall being tampered with would have to wait until morning. Nothing they could do about it that night, anyway.
When Maxie returned to her own room, she told Tinker what she had discovered.
Tinker wasn’t surprised. “It seems to me,” she said solemnly when Maxie had changed into the oversized T-shirt she slept in and sat down on her bed, “that the only person who would want to ruin the ceremony would be someone who was mad that they weren’t taking part in it.”
“You mean like Isabella or Holly?” Brendan had suggested the same thing. Had Erica ever checked the list? She hadn’t said anything about talking to either of the girls. Maybe she hadn’t had time.
Tinker nodded. “Exactly. I just can’t think of anyone else who would want to hurt Cath. Who would hate someone as nice and as quiet as Cath? She’s not the kind of person to have enemies.” Tinker’s eyes were clouded with shock and fatigue. “I don’t want to think about this anymore. It’s too depressing. I’m going to sleep.”
But as Tinker’s breath deepened, evened out and became the steady breathing of a deep sleeper, Maxie wondered if that really was the right answer. And then an even creepier thou
ght forced its way into her mind.
After what had happened to Cath, it might be stupid to pass off the events of the past few days as simple game-playing. It could be something much worse. Maybe the person responsible wasn’t just playing games.
Maybe he or she was … crazy. Over the edge. A loose cannon. It might have all started as a game, but now …
Crazy?
How could a crazy person be running around Omega house without anyone noticing?
When she finally climbed into bed in the darkened room, it struck her that in all the time she’d been in Omega house, she had never heard it so completely silent. It wasn’t just that everyone was asleep. Maxie often pulled all-nighters to get a paper written, so she knew the silence of the sleeping house.
But on this night, the silence was different.
Now the air seemed still as if everyone in the house were holding her breath. Waiting in fear for whatever would happen next.
Chapter 10
MAXIE DRESSED QUICKLY THE next morning, intent on giving Erica the bad news about the brick wall.
But when she went to Erica’s room and knocked, there was no answer. Probably taking a shower.
Maxie wasn’t willing to wait. Mildred would have to be told first. The police had to be notified. Even if she was wrong about the wall, and she was positive that she wasn’t, the police would have scientific ways of proving whether or not the wall had actually been tampered with. Then they’d find the person who had done it and take him or her away, so that life at Omega house could return to normal.
Maxie found Mildred in the kitchen. When the news about the wall had registered, Mildred promptly went to the wall telephone to call the Twin Falls police.
Erica, fresh from a shower, her long, blonde hair still damp, was on the telephone when Maxie went upstairs. Tinker was in the room, too. She signaled to Maxie to come in and take a seat while Erica finished her conversation.