by L. J. Smith
Audrey drew in her breath, frowning. “Like that thing we saw those kids playing?”
“What lambs and monsters?” Michael demanded. “I never heard of it.”
“It’s like cops and robbers,” Jenny said. “It starts like hide-and-seek—if you’re the monster, you count while all the lambs hide. Then when you find a lamb, you chase it—and if you tag it, it’s caught. Then you bring it back to your base and keep it as a prisoner until somebody else sneaks up to let it free.”
“Or until all the lambs are caught and they get eaten,” Audrey said darkly.
“Cute game,” said Zach, then relapsed into silence.
“If we’re playing, we’d better figure out the rules,” Dee said.
“We may not have to play,” Jenny said.
They all looked at her. She knew she was flushed. She had been thinking ever since she’d looked over the balcony railing to see Audrey’s tiny figure disappear into darkness, and by now she’d worked herself into a rather odd state.
“What do you mean?” Dee said, lynx-eyed.
Jenny heard herself give a strange little overstrained laugh. “Well, maybe I should just stop it right now.”
She was surprised by the volume of the protest.
“No!” Audrey cried. “Give in to a guy—any guy? Absolutely not. Never.”
“We have to fight him,” Dee said, smacking a slender fist into her palm. “You know that, Jenny.”
“We’re going to fight him,” Tom said grimly.
“Uh, look,” Michael said, and then got Audrey’s elbow in his ribs. “I mean—you’d better not.”
“That’s right, you’d better not,” Audrey said. “And I’m the one who got chased tonight, so I’m the one who’s got the right to say it.”
“We won’t let you,” Dee said, both long legs on the floor now, leaning forward in the intensity of her emotion. “It’s our problem, too.”
Jenny could feel herself flushing more deeply as a wave of guilt swept her. They didn’t understand—they didn’t know that she’d almost surrendered of her own free will.
“He’s evil,” Tom was saying. “You can’t just give up and let evil win because of us. You can’t, Jenny.”
Zach’s dry voice cut through the impassioned atmosphere. “I don’t think,” he said, “that there’s much point in arguing about it. Because from what Jenny said before, it sounded like she agreed to the new Game.”
“I did,” Jenny said. “I didn’t know—when I agreed I thought he’d leave the rest of you alone. I didn’t think you’d be involved.”
“And he said the Game had started. Which means—”
“There’s nothing she can do to change it now, even if she wanted to.” Audrey finished Zach’s sentence crisply.
“Like I said”—Dee gave her most bloodthirsty smile—“I think we’d better figure out the rules.”
They all looked at one another. Jenny saw the consensus in all their faces. They were all together now, even Tom. Like the old days. All for one and one for all.
She sat down on the love seat beside Tom.
“So what do we need to do to win?” Audrey asked.
“Avoid getting caught,” Zach said tersely.
Michael, rummaging glumly in his Cracker Jack, said, “How? We can’t stay here forever.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Dee said. “Look—there are different kinds of games, right? The first Game, the one in the paper house, was like a race game. In a race game the point is to get from the start to the goal in a certain amount of time—or before everybody else does.”
“Like Parcheesi,” Jenny said.
“No, like Chutes and Ladders!” Michael said, looking up excitedly. “Remember that? You throw the dice and go across the board—and sometimes you can go up a ladder, the way we went up the stairs in the paper house. And sometimes you fall down a chute—”
“—which we did, on the third floor,” Dee said.
“We had that game as kids,” Zach said with a half glance at Jenny. “Only ours was called Snakes and Ladders.”
“Okay, the point is that lots of games are race games,” Dee went on. She jumped up and began to pace the room. “But then there are hunting games, too—those are actually the oldest games of all. Like hide-and-seek. That started out as practice for stalking wild animals.”
“How do you know?” Michael said suspiciously.
“Aba told me. And tag is like capturing domestic animals. This new game Julian is playing is a hunting and capturing game.”
Tom shrugged bleakly. “So he’s planning to hunt down and capture each of us animals.”
“Trophies,” Zach said in a low voice. “Like my father’s.”
“Not like your father’s,” Dee said, stopping to look at him. “Your father’s are dead. This is more like a game where you catch each of the animals and put them in a big pen to wait for the slaughter.”
Michael choked on his Coke.
“Well, it’s true,” Dee said. “He didn’t say he was going to kill us one by one. He said he was going to capture us—until the free ones find his base.”
Wiping his mouth, Michael said hoarsely, “Let’s find it now and avoid the whole thing.”
“But that’s the point,” Dee said, sitting on the windowsill. “How do we find it?”
“How can we?” Zach said. “It’s hopeless.”
Tom was still looking into the distance. “There might be another way,” he began, and then stopped and shook his head. Jenny didn’t like the expression on his face. She didn’t like the way the green flecks in his eyes showed.
“Tom . . .” she said, but Audrey was talking to her.
“Didn’t he tell you anything about it, Jenny? His base?”
“No,” Jenny said. “Only that it was somewhere to keep us before he takes us to the Shadow World.”
“Which means it’s not in the Shadow World itself,” Dee said, and Michael muttered, “Thank God.”
“But wherever it is, you get there through the holes?” Audrey said. “Oh, wonderful. I’ll pass, thank you.”
“These holes, now,” Michael said thoughtfully. “I think they’re very interesting.”
“Maybe because you have one for a brain,” Audrey said with a snappishness she hadn’t shown to Michael in weeks.
Michael gave her a startled glance quite different from his standard wounded look. “No, really,” he said. “You know, they make me think of something. There’s a story by Ambrose Bierce—the book’s probably around here somewhere.” He twisted his head toward the wall-to-wall bookcases that were the main feature of the living room. Michael’s father wrote science fiction, and the apartment was filled with strange things. Models of spaceships, posters of obscure SF movies, weird masks—but mainly books. Books overflowing the shelves and lying in piles on the floor. As usual, Michael couldn’t find the one he was looking for.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “Ambrose Bierce wrote this trilogy about weird disappearances, and there was this one story about a sixteen-year-old boy. His name was Charles Ashmore, and one night after it snowed he went out to the spring to get water. Well, the thing was, he went out the door and he never came back. Afterward, his family went outside to see what was the matter, and they saw his tracks in the snow—and the tracks went halfway to the spring and just stopped dead.” Michael lowered his voice dramatically. “Nobody ever saw him again.”
“Great,” Jenny said. “But what has that got to do with things?”
“Well, the story was supposed to be fiction, right? But there was another part in the book, where this German doctor—Dr. Hern, or something—had a theory about how people disappeared. He said that ‘in the visible world there are void places’—sort of like the holes in Swiss cheese.”
“And that guy fell into one?” Dee said, looking intrigued.
“Fell—or was dragged. Like I said, the stories were supposed to be fiction. But what if there really are voids like that? And what if Julian c
an—well, control them?”
“That’s a nasty idea,” Dee said. “I like it.”
“Are you saying all people who disappear fall into the Shadow World?” Audrey asked.
“Maybe not all of them, but maybe some of them. And maybe not all the way in, maybe just partway. In the story, when Charles Ashmore’s mother went by the place where he disappeared the next day, she could hear his voice. She heard it fainter and fainter every day, until it finally just faded completely.”
“A halfway place,” Jenny whispered. “Like the More Games store—some place halfway between the Shadow World and here.”
Dee was looking at her shrewdly. “Like Julian’s base, huh? Somewhere to keep us until he takes us to the Shadow World.”
“And you hear about vortex things in Stonehenge and Sedona, Arizona,” Michael said. “Was it like a vortex, Audrey?”
“It was big and black,” Audrey said shortly. “I don’t know how much more vortexy you can get.” But she gave Michael the prize from her Cracker Jack, a blue plastic magnifying glass. He put it beside his prize, a mini baseball card.
Jenny was playing absently at her own prize package, not really seeing it. “But it doesn’t help us find the base,” she said. “Unless we jump into one of those voids, and then I don’t think we’re coming back.”
“It closed up completely,” Tom said. “After the wolf jumped into it, it just disappeared. I don’t even think I could find the place again.”
“Anyway, I’ll bet he can move them around,” Michael was beginning, when Jenny gasped.
She had torn open her prize package. She’d been fiddling with the prize, completely preoccupied with the question of voids—until something caught her eye.
“What is it?” Dee said, jumping up from the windowsill.
“It’s a book of poetry—or something.” It was a very small book, on cheap paper with large print. One sentence per page. But it was a very strange poem for a Cracker Jack prize.
Jenny read:
“In the midst of the word she was trying to say,
In the midst of her laughter and glee,
She had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”
There was dead silence in the room.
“It could be a coincidence,” Zach said slowly.
Michael was shaking his rumpled head. “But those lines are wrong. That’s not the way they go—look, that book I know I’ve got.” He went into his bedroom and came out with Alice in Wonderland and Other Favorites. “They’re from a poem about these guys who go out hunting imaginary animals—Snarks. Only some of the Snarks are Boojums, and those hunt you. And in the end one of them finds a Snark, and it turns out to be a Boojum. But it’s he in the poem—‘In the midst of the word he was trying to say, / In the midst of his laughter and glee . . .’ You see?”
“Cracker Jack wouldn’t make a mistake like that,” Tom said, with a wry smile.
“No,” Jenny whispered. “It’s from Julian. But is it about what almost happened tonight—or about something that’s going to happen?”
The silence stretched. Tom’s brows were drawn together. Dee had her jaguar look on and was pacing again. Zachary’s gray eyes were narrow, his lean body tense and still.
Michael had put down the book. “You think he’s giving us clues in advance?”
“It would be—sporting, I guess,” Jenny said. “And he gave me a kind of clue on the balcony, remember. He said he’d go after ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ first.”
Everyone looked at everyone else speculatively. Suddenly Dee whirled and did a swift, flowing punch-and-kick. “Then we might just have a chance!”
Excitement was passing from one of them to another like sparks traveling down a fuse.
“If we can figure the clues out beforehand—and then just surround the person they’re about . . .” Dee said.
“I know we can! I always wanted to be Sherlock Holmes,” said Michael.
“I think it might actually work,” Tom said. A new light had kindled in his hazel eyes.
Dee laughed exultantly. “Of course it will work! We’re going to beat him.”
Jenny was caught up in the fervor herself. Maybe they could outthink Julian. “It’s not going to be easy—”
“But we’ll do it,” Audrey said. “Because we have to.” She gave Jenny a spiky-lashed glance and picked up several empty Coke cans to take to the kitchen.
“We’d better start with the one we have, then,” Zach said, turning a cool, analytical gaze on Jenny’s riddle book.
“Unless that one’s already finished,” Michael said. “I mean, if it was about Audrey—or should I call you Little Red Riding-Hood?” he shouted to the kitchen.
“Call me madam,” Audrey said from around the corner, her good humor clearly restored. “Call me Al.” She began to sing a Paul Simon song. “‘I can call you Betty, and Betty, when you call me, you can call me—’”
“Well?” Michael yelled when she didn’t finish. “What can I call you?”
Audrey didn’t answer, and Michael snorted, “Women!”
Zach was saying, “Yeah, but what if it’s a new clue? It says she, so it’s got to be either—”
Jenny heard him as if from a distance. She was listening, listening, and all at once she couldn’t breathe.
“Audrey?” she said. The sound of rattling cans in the kitchen had stopped. “Audrey? Audrey? ”
Everyone was looking at her, frightened by something in her voice. The sound of raw panic, Jenny guessed. Jenny stared back at them, and their images seemed to waver. Utter silence came from the kitchen.
Then she was on her feet and moving. She reached the corner before any of them, even Dee. She looked into the kitchen.
Her screams rang off the light fixture in the ceiling.
“No! No! Oh, God, no!”
CHAPTER 11
The kitchen was empty. A trickle of water ran out of the faucet, and there was an odd, sharp smell. Sitting grotesquely in the middle of the green linoleum floor was a paper doll.
It was folded to allow it to sit, and one arm was twisted up to give it a mockingly casual air. As if Audrey were saying: “Here I am. Where have you been?” It was obscene.
Tom’s hands were on Jenny’s shoulders, trying to calm her. She wrenched away from him and picked the macabre little figure up. It was the doll Audrey had used in the Game, her playing piece in the paper house. Audrey herself had drawn the face, had colored in the hair and clothes with Joey’s crayons. Jenny hadn’t seen it since she’d packed it up with the rest of the Game in the white box. She realized suddenly that it hadn’t been in Angela’s toolshed. None of the dolls had.
The waxy face looked up at Jenny with a terrible cunning smile. A U of bright pink. As if this doll knew what had happened to the real Audrey, and was glad about it.
“Oh, God—God,” Jenny was gasping, almost sobbing. The doll crumpled in her hand. Everything in the kitchen was wavering.
“I don’t believe it,” Michael said, pushing past the others. “Where is she?” He stared at Jenny, grabbed her arm. “Where is she?”
Tom grabbed Michael. “Let go of her.”
“Where’s Audrey?”
“I said, let go of her!”
Dee’s voice rang out dangerously. “Cool off, both of you!”
“But how did she get out of the kitchen?” Michael said wildly. “We were right around the corner—we didn’t hear anything. Nothing could have happened to her. We were right there.”
Dee was kneeling on the floor, running her fingers across the linoleum.
“It’s darker here—see? This whole area is darker. And it smells burned.”
Jenny could see it now, a circle of darker green several feet in diameter.
Tom was still gripping Michael, but his voice was quiet. “You didn’t see that thing on the beach—that void, Mike. It didn’t make any noise at all. That’s how she got out of the kitchen.”
“‘In the midst of the word she was trying to say, / In the midst of her laughter and glee,’” Zachary quoted, behind them.
Jenny turned sharply to see him standing there. With his thin, intense face and his dark-circled eyes, he looked like a prophet of doom. But when his gray eyes met Jenny’s, she knew he cared. He was still holding the poem.
The last of the cloudiness in Jenny’s head vanished. Tears and hysterics weren’t going to help Audrey. They weren’t going to help anyone. She looked down at the crumpled paper doll in her hand.
It was her fault. Audrey had fallen into a black hole, and it was Jenny’s fault, just as Summer’s death had been. But Audrey wasn’t dead yet.
“I’ll find her,” Jenny said softly to the paper thing she held. “I’ll find her, and then I’ll rip you to pieces. I’m going to win this Game.”
It went on smiling its cunning waxy smile, bland and malevolent.
Michael was sniffling and rubbing his nose. Dee was investigating the floor like an ebony huntress.
“It’s like the marks a UFO might leave,” she said. “When it lands, I mean. A perfect circle.”
“Or a fairy ring,” Michael said thickly. “She was so scared of that kind of stuff—legend stuff, you know?” Tom patted him on the back.
“The Erlking,” Jenny said grimly. She reached across Tom to grip the sleeve of Michael’s sweatshirt. “But we got her back from him last time, Michael. We’ll get here back now.”
Dee stood in one fluid, graceful motion. “I think we’d all better stay together from now on,” she said.
Zach had moved up behind Jenny. The five of them were together, standing in one connected knot in the center of the kitchen. Jenny felt herself draw strength from all the others.
“We can sleep in the living room,” Michael said. “On the floor. We can push the furniture back.”
They raided the bedrooms for blankets and mattresses and found sleeping bags in the closet. In the bathroom Jenny stripped off her golden dress and put on an old sweatsuit of Michael’s. She jammed the shimmering material in the laundry hamper, never wanting to see it again.