The Hunter; The Chase; The Kill

by L. J. Smith

But Jenny had seen where the handle was. She reached for it in the darkness. Her fingers brushed it—it was cold. Real metal in her hand. She had it!

  She pulled.

  Rushing wind surrounded her. The cold metal seemed to melt from under her fingers, and she was falling. Her scream was snatched away by the thunder of the air.

  She had never seen anyone look as surprised as Audrey and Zach and Dee and Tom and Michael did. Their five faces were turned toward her, staring, mouths and eyes open, as she staggered forward and landed on her knees.

  Now, what just happened—? Jenny thought, but before she could look behind her, they were all around her.

  “You came through the door,” Audrey said, greatly excited. She was still wearing the black Oscar de la Renta dress Jenny had last seen her in, and it was more bedraggled than ever. Her copper hair was down.

  “Are you all right?” Tom asked. There were muddy streaks on his cheekbones. He reached out to take her hand, her left hand, without seeming to care about the ring on it.

  “Of course she’s all right. She came through the door,” Dee said gleefully. She patted Jenny’s head in a frenzy of affection. “Eat that, monster!” she shouted to the ceiling.

  “You lied to me,” Michael said. He still had the hamster look, only now his lower lip was pushed out pathetically, too. “You said it wouldn’t get me, and it did.”

  Jenny leaned against Tom’s warmth and solidity and shut her eyes—which made tears trickle out. She had never been so glad to hear Michael’s complaining in her life.

  “It’s you—it’s all of you,” she said, opening her eyes with a little sob that sounded strange even to herself. “You’re really here.”

  “Of course we’re here,” Audrey said. She sounded cross, which meant she was feeling affectionate. “Where else would we be?”

  Dee grinned. “We’ve been waiting for you to come get us, Tiger. Didn’t I say she would? Didn’t I?”

  Jenny looked at Zach. He had black circles under his eyes and his skin had a waxy tint, but there was something oddly peaceful in his expression. “Are you okay?” she said. “Are you all okay?”

  Zach shrugged. “We’re alive. It seems like a week we’ve been here, but Tom says it’s only a couple of days. I just wish I could get back and develop these.” He jangled the camera around his neck, and Jenny looked at him in surprise. “Got some great shots of that snake.” His eyes met Jenny’s, and he smiled.

  Jenny smiled back.

  “I was here alone first,” Audrey was saying. “For more than a whole day. That was fun.” She pressed her lips together.

  “It’s not so bad,” Dee said. “It’s sort of like the army. We sleep on the tables—see, there’re blankets over there. And there’s a bathroom, and food comes out there. A cafeteria’s actually a pretty good place to keep people. But we never could get that door open, and none of us came in through it.”

  Jenny looked around. It was a cafeteria, all right. The Vista Grande High School cafeteria. Exactly like the photograph, except that the tables had been unstacked and the six of them were standing around.

  The only really peculiar thing was that there was only one door in all the four walls, the only door that had been visible in the picture.

  “How did you guys get here, then?” she asked.

  “Through the ceiling,” Michael said grimly. “I kid you not.”

  Jenny blinked up at the ceiling. There was a large black hole in the center. Blue electricity crackled through the darkness.

  Tom spoke quietly beside her. “We can’t get up there. We tried. There aren’t enough tables—and something really strange happens when you get anywhere near that high. Time seems to slow down and you start to pass out.”

  Jenny looked down from the hole. “But you’re all okay. The snake and the wolf didn’t hurt anybody?”

  “No,” Dee said. “They just wanted us to fall in the vortexes. And they’re dead now, you know. Tom got ’em.”

  “I think I got them,” Tom said cautiously. “Michael was just telling us that you hadn’t seen them tonight. . . .”

  “You did get them,” Jenny said. “You must have, because they’re gone. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do, going off alone like that”—she squeezed his hand hard—“but I’m glad you did, because if you hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. I had to jump over a hole—a vortex or whatever you call it—and if they’d been around, I’m sure they’d have chased me back in.”

  Dee looked interested. “So just where was Julian when you were jumping?”

  “In the vortex. I pushed him.”

  Dee stared at her, then snorted with laughter. In a minute they were all laughing hysterically. Even Zach was chuckling. Dee punched Jenny in the arm.

  “He’s gonna be mad,” Michael hiccuped weakly as the hysteria subsided.

  “He is. What difference does it make?” Jenny said coolly. “I found the base. I won.” She waved a hand at them. “All you little lambs are free.” Then she looked around and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  Everyone settled back. The joyful frenzy showed the first cracks as they stared around them, waiting for some change. Tom’s eyebrows were drawing together darkly. Dee’s beautifully sculpted lips lifted to show teeth.

  “Oh, you would, would you?” she said softly and dangerously to nothing. “You cheat.”

  “Maybe we have to yell,” Michael said. “Oly-oly-oxen free!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Zach. “We are in. We want to get out.”

  “And he’s got to let us out,” Jenny said. She stood up, looking at the hole in the ceiling. “It’s the rules of the Game. Unless he is planning to cheat,” she added loudly, feeling reckless and bold with Tom’s hand in hers.

  “I never cheat,” Julian said, from behind them. “I practice Gamesmanship—the art of winning games without actually cheating.”

  Jenny turned. Julian was standing just in front of the door—which was now open. The red Exit sign blinked and glowed madly above it, looking as if it would blow a fuse at any moment. That should have been a good omen, but the look on Julian’s face wasn’t encouraging at all. His eyes were glittering like blue glass, and there was something cruel and predatory about his mouth.

  “Then you’ll let us go,” Jenny said, not quite so boldly as before. She steadied her voice and made herself meet his eyes, lifting her chin proudly. “I got in myself, Julian,” she said. “I found the base.”

  “Yes, you did.” Even here, in the well-lit cafeteria, it seemed like twilight around him. A strange, enchanted twilight that was somehow brighter and more real than any daytime Jenny had ever seen. “You found the base. You won the Game. Now all you have to do is walk out.”

  “While you block the door,” Dee said scornfully. “Looks like you’ll have to do it yourself this time, since your animal friends aren’t here to do it for you.”

  “Block the door?” Julian widened his cat-tilted eyes innocently, somehow looking more disturbingly beautiful than ever. And more triumphant. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He stepped away from the exit, gesturing with languid, careless grace, as if to usher them in. “Go on. All you have to do is walk through there, and you’ll be outside the photograph. In Zach’s garage. Safe and sound.”

  “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” Michael whispered in Jenny’s ear. But Dee, always eager for a challenge, was already moving toward the door. She flashed an ebony glance toward Julian as she passed him, and he bowed gracefully. Then he lifted his head and smiled at Jenny, who was standing in the protective circle of Tom’s arm.

  “I told you once not to mess with me,” he said. Under his heavy lashes his eyes were blue as flame.

  Alarm spurted through Jenny. “Dee—” she began. But it was already happening.

  Just as Dee reached the door, there was a tremendous sound—a sound that was both loud and soft at the same time. It was almost like the sound a gas burner makes when you turn it on and the gas ignites. A
muffled whompf.

  Only this was a hundred times louder, and it came from all around them. Jenny’s ears popped. Heat struck her from every direction at once, and a blast of burning air sent her hair streaming straight upward.

  Dee was thrown backward by the force of the explosion, breaking her fall by striking the ground first with her forearms and palms. The next instant Jenny was holding her, her voice hard with anxiety.

  “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

  Dee’s sooty lashes fluttered. Her slim chest was heaving, and her neck, long and graceful as a black swan’s, lay arched back on Jenny’s arm.

  “Dee!”

  “I’ll give him gamesmanship,” Dee gasped at last. Her eyes opened into narrow onyx slits, her breath still hitching. “I’ll give him gamesmanship right up the—”

  “He’s gone,” Zach interrupted flatly. “And we’re all in trouble, so I wouldn’t waste your breath.”

  For a moment Jenny was so glad to see Dee unhurt that she didn’t care. Then she looked up and understood what Zach meant.

  They were inside a ring of fire.

  It was just slightly smaller than the dimensions of the cafeteria—and for all Jenny knew the cafeteria walls were still outside of it. You couldn’t see through it to tell. It was as high as the cafeteria ceiling, and it was hot.

  And loud.

  Incredibly loud. Jenny realized that she and the others had been shouting over it to be heard. It made an unbelievable, unremitting roaring. Like the thundering of Niagara Falls, or the blast of a hurricane.

  How weird, Jenny thought, part of her mind examining this fact with a curious calm. I guess when you get to a certain extreme, the elements all sound like one another—fire sounds like water sounds like wind. I’ll have to remember that.

  There was something else about the sound. It was deadly.

  You knew, somehow, listening to it, that it was absolutely lethal. If destruction had a voice, this was it.

  “I suppose that’s why people jump out of windows, even from the twentieth floor, or whatever,” she said to Tom, almost dreamily. “You know, from a burning building, I mean.”

  He gave her a sharp look, then lifted her, practically carrying her to one of the cafeteria tables. “Lie down.”

  “I’m all right—”

  “Jenny, lie down before you pass out.”

  Jenny suddenly realized that she’d better. She was shaking violently all over, tiny tremors that seemed to come from deep inside her. Her fingers and lips were numb.

  “She’s in shock,” Audrey said as Jenny lay back on the bench. “And no wonder, after everything that’s happened. Jenny, shut your eyes for a while. Try to relax.”

  Jenny shut her eyes obediently. She could see the fire just as well that way as with them open. A wave of dizziness rolled over her. She could hear the others speaking, but their shouts seemed thin and far away.

  “—not going to last long with this heat,” Tom was saying.

  “No—but what can we do?” That was Zach.

  “We’re going to get roasted.” And that was Michael. “Better find some mint sauce.”

  “Shut up or I’ll croak you myself, Mikey,” Dee said.

  I can’t let them get roasted, Jenny thought. Her thoughts were vague and dreamlike, held together by the thinnest of floating strings. It was a state almost like the moments before sleep, when nonsense seems perfectly sensible, and words and pictures come from nowhere.

  Right now she was experiencing something like drowning. Her life flashing before her—or at least the last three weeks—or at least bits of them. Disconnected, jumbled images, each sharp as a clip from a high-grade home video.

  Julian appeared, beautiful as a December morning, his eyes like liquid cobalt, his hair moon-wet. “I never cheat. I practice Gamesmanship. . . .”

  And Aba, her old face with its fine bones under velvety night-black skin. “Last night I dreamed a Hausa story. . . .”

  And Michael, dear Michael, his hair wildly mussed, dark eyes shining with enthusiasm: “See, your brain is like a modeling system. It takes the input from your senses and makes the most reasonable model it can. . . .”

  And Zach, thin and beaky-nosed, gray eyes alight with a fierce gleam. “A picture of a pipe is not a pipe.”

  As Jenny drifted, ears filled with the noise of the fire, all the images seemed to float together, merging and intertwining. As if Aba and Michael and Zach were speaking at once.

  “Without another word the girl dived into the river of fire. . . .”

  “Touching’s just another sense. It could be fooled, too. . . .”

  “The image isn’t reality. Even though we’re used to thinking that way. . . .”

  “The fire burned her, of course—my mother always said ‘The fire burned her like fire. . . .’”

  “If a model’s good enough, there would be no way to tell it wasn’t real. . . .”

  “We show a kid a picture of a dog and say ‘This is a doggie’—but it’s not. . . .”

  Jenny sat up. The fire was burning as fiercely as ever, like all the beach bonfires in the world fused into one. Tom and Dee and the others were standing in a sort of football huddle a few feet away. Jenny felt light-headed but good. She felt light all over, in fact, as if carbonated bubbles were lifting her toward the ceiling, bursting inside her. She felt glorious.

  “That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s it.”

  She had to shout to make them hear her. “Tom. Tom, come here—everybody come here. I’ve got it. I know how to get out.”

  They crowded around her. “What?” “You’re kidding!” “Tell us.”

  Jenny laughed for the sheer pleasure of laughing, feeling crystal clear and brilliant. Like a sphere filled with moonlight. She lifted her arms joyfully, shook back her hair, and laughed again.

  The others exchanged glances, their expressions changing from excitement to consternation.

  “No, it’s okay,” Jenny assured them. “I know how we get out—we just walk. Don’t you see? The fire isn’t real! It’s a model our brains are making.”

  They didn’t look nearly as happy as she would have thought. They blinked at her, then at one another. Michael opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking nervously at Audrey. Audrey sighed.

  “Ah.” Dee glanced at the others, then patted Jenny’s shoulder. “Okay, Sunshine. You go back to sleep, and later we’ll talk about it.”

  “What, you think I’m joking? I’m not. I’m telling you—we can walk right out of here.”

  “Uh, Tiger—” Dee looked over her shoulder at the fire, then back at Jenny. “I hate to tell you, but that fire is not a model in my brain. It’s hot. I’ve got blisters.” She showed Jenny several fluid-filled bumps on her hand.

  Jenny looked at them, briefly shaken. Then she recovered. “That’s because you let it happen. You believed in the heat, and it gave you blisters,” she said. “No, Dee, don’t humor me, damn it!” she added. “I’m serious. You know how hypnotized people can get a blister if you tell them that you’re touching them with something hot—even if it isn’t hot. It’s like that.”

  Michael ran his hands through his hair. “No, but Jenny, it’s really hot. You can’t even get near it.”

  “That’s because you believe it’s hot. You were the one who said it, Michael: If a model is good enough, you can’t tell the difference between it and reality.” She looked from one face to another. The glorious lightness had disappeared; now she felt crushing disappointment. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? All of you.”

  “Jenny, you’ve been through so much—”

  “I don’t want sympathy, Audrey! I want you to listen. Will you listen, Zach?” She turned to him desperately. “Remember Magritte? You told me that the image is not the reality, and I said, ‘Unless you have somebody who can make an image into reality.’ But what if that’s not what Julian does? What if he doesn’t make an image into reality, but he makes us think it’s reality? If he shows our sen
ses something so convincing that our brains make a model of it and believe it—even though it’s just an illusion? Like a dream.”

  “‘What if?’” Zach quoted back to her. “That’s a pretty big if, Jenny. What if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we’re toast,” Michael muttered.

  “But it’s the only thing that makes sense,” Jenny said. “Remember, Julian said he wouldn’t actually cheat. If the fire’s real and there’s no way to get through it, then that’s cheating. Right? Don’t you think?”

  “I think your faith in him is charming,” Audrey said acidly, her copper-colored eyebrows raised. She looked at Tom, but Tom looked away. Refusing to side against Jenny—but not looking at Jenny, either.

  “It’s not just faith in him. It’s sense,” Jenny said. “Don’t you see: Aba had a dream almost exactly like this. And the girl in that story came through all right. Her will was strong enough.”

  “But the fire burned her,” Michael pointed out.

  “But it didn’t kill her. I’m not saying it won’t hurt—I’m sure it will, from the look of Dee’s blisters. But I don’t think it will kill unless we let it. If our will is strong enough, we can get through.” But she could see by their faces that they were still unconvinced.

  Despair clutched at Jenny’s chest. “Dee?” she said, almost pleading.

  Dee shifted uncomfortably. “Sunshine—if it were anything else . . . but I’ve been there. It sure felt like a real fire to me. And even if I could convince myself to walk in—what happens if I get into the middle of it and my will suddenly isn’t strong enough?”

  “. . . toast,” Michael said.

  Audrey spoke decisively. “It’s too big a risk.”

  “When an illusion is that good,” Zach said, “it might as well be real. It can still kill us.”

  Jenny stood.

  “Okay,” she said. “I understand—if it wasn’t my own idea, I’d probably think it was crazy, too. And I’m the one who got you all into this, so it’s only fair I get you out. I’m going in alone.”

  Tom’s head jerked around. “Now, wait a minute—” he said at the same moment Zach said, “Now, look—”

  “No, it’s decided,” Jenny said. “I have the best chance, since I’m the one who believes I can get through it.”