Dark Moon (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  “I’ve been on it four times already,” Serena said dryly.

  “Well, you live at Nightmare Hall,” Andie retorted. “The Snake is probably tame in comparison.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry you feel that way, Andie,” Serena said with a devilish grin, “because I was going to invite all of you over.”

  “Well, I just meant I wouldn’t want to live there,” Andie said. “It couldn’t hurt to stop by just for a few minutes. I’ve been there before and came out in one piece.”

  When the committee gathered together at the exit at ten o’clock, Eve learned that of all of them, only she and Garth had never been inside Nightingale Hall. Even the townspeople on the committee had at one time or another visited the place.

  Eve and the others on the campus committee climbed into Garth’s car and headed for Vinnie’s to pick up some pizza. Then they went on to Nightingale Hall.

  Thanks to the brightness of the full moon, shining like a spotlight down on the house and grounds, the property didn’t seem as ominous as usual when they pulled up the curving, gravel driveway.

  Inside, Eve was impressed by the size of the house, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, and its old, mellow woodwork. The library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and a huge fireplace, seemed almost welcoming as Serena led them inside and placed the pizza boxes on a low, heavy wooden coffee table in the center of the room. The table was flanked by ugly brown upholstered furniture, but the long, narrow windows were open to the warm May breeze and silvery moonlight shone in on the worn Oriental carpet.

  Serena took them on a tour of the three-story house. Eve was amazed to discover that she really liked it. In spite of its shabbiness, it seemed warmer and more welcoming, by far, than the immaculate but cold little house she’d grown up in.

  “It’s nicer than I expected,” she admitted to Serena as they passed paper plates and napkins around. “But why did you pick this place instead of an on-campus dorm?”

  “Money, pure and simple. I’m paying my own way through school and I watch my pennies carefully. I’d heard all the stories about this place before I’d even moved in. But it was cheap, and besides, I thought the stories were interesting. I keep waiting for a ghost or two to appear, but so far,” Serena shrugged, “no luck.”

  “Too bad,” Eve teased.

  Serena shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to communicate with the other side.”

  “The other side?” Eve asked.

  “Oh, you know,” Serena said matter-of-factly, taking a slice of pizza and carefully sliding it onto her paper plate, “the other side. My parents are dead and there are a lot of things I didn’t get to say while they were alive.”

  “You don’t really believe that’s possible, do you?” Eve asked.

  “Who knows? But Dr. Litton says there are people who believe it’s possible. You never know, right?”

  Garth, pizza in hand, nodded. “True.” Andie and Alfred nodded, too.

  Eve felt like a square peg stuck in a round hole. Am I the only one? she wondered. Am I the only person in this room who has to see things to believe them? Maybe the voice was right tonight. Maybe I do have a narrow, closed little mind.

  Once upon a time, she had had imagination. She had daydreamed, she had believed in leprechauns and the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, and she had believed that anything was possible. Anything.

  But that was before she’d lived alone with Nell Forsythe for nine long, long, years.

  Would she ever be who she used to be, who she really was?

  Maybe it was too late.

  Her hand reached up tentatively to the back of her head. She fingered the brass barrette. It would be so easy to unclasp it and set her hair free. Would that change anything? Would it free her mind as well as her hair?

  Ridiculous. It wasn’t as if she actually wanted to believe in the ability to speak to “the other side.” And this wasn’t the time for change. Not now. Not when she had so much to do.

  That night when she and Andie got back to their room, Eve brushed her teeth, and flossed as usual. But she didn’t hang up her blouse and skirt, just tossed them over a chair, ignoring the look of exaggerated shock on Andie’s face and her wry commentary, “Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing? Eve Forsythe not hanging up her clothes, which are color-coordinated in her closet? Maybe there’s hope for you yet, roomie.”

  Too tired to take offense, Eve threw herself down on the bed.

  And heard a whacking sound that she shouldn’t have heard when her head hit the pillow.

  “Ow! What was that? She sat up in bed, frowning.

  “What was what?” Andie said, climbing into her own bed, on the opposite side of the room.

  “That crack! There’s something under my pillow.” Eve reached over and turned the bedside lamp back on. Lifted her pillow. Saw a book. A hardcover book, small but wide. A children’s book. One she was familiar with. Her mother had been too busy to read to her, but the children Eve had baby-sat for while she was in high school had two copies. It was their favorite book, and it hadn’t taken her long to memorize it.

  She reached down, lifted the book, held it up for Andie to see.

  The title of the children’s book, a popular one, the book that someone had hidden under her pillow, was Moonchild. It was the story of a sick, lonely little boy who, in his fantasies, had made friends with the man in the moon, and then went to live with him when he died.

  Eve’s eyes never left the cover. It was the drawing she was familiar with, had looked at countless times while baby-sitting. But there was something very wrong with the cover of this edition.

  On the cover of the book she knew so well, a full, silvery moon had been clearly visible in a sky full of stars just outside the window of the child’s hospital room.

  The moon was still clearly visible on the cover she held in her hands. But there were two things wrong with it.

  Someone had drawn, with black marker, a fat, dark cloud across the upper half of the round, silver orb.

  But it was the lower half of the moon that held Eve’s shocked gaze. It had been slashed with vivid streaks of bright red, dripping into the navy-blue night sky like …

  Blood.

  Chapter 13

  “WHAT IS THAT?” ANDIE asked as Eve continued to sit quietly on the edge of her bed staring down at the book in her hands.

  Mute, Eve held the book up so that Andie could see the cover.

  “Oh, I know that book. My mother read it to me a couple of times when she was in a really good mood and felt like some mother-daughter bonding.” Andie laughed harshly. “Which means, not very often.” Then, “The cover looks different, though.”

  Eve found her voice. “It is different.” She pointed out the two glaring violations.

  “Oh, Eve, that’s gross!” Andie got up and came over to examine the cover. “Are you sure it’s supposed to be blood?” When she had studied the picture, she admitted, “It does look like it. I mean, the way it’s dripping, what else could it be?” Leaving the book in Eve’s hands, she returned to her own bed, sat on it with her knees drawn up and her arms encircling them. “That really is gross, Eve. It was under your pillow? How did it get there?”

  A question Eve couldn’t answer. With an index finger, she scraped absentmindedly at the dripping red. It remained in place. Marker. Indelible marker, she thought, just like the one I used in the Mirror Maze. Someone else on campus has discovered how useful markers can be.

  “Eve,” Andie said, her voice tense, “someone got in here while we were gone.” She glanced around the room uneasily. “I don’t like that. In fact, I hate it. If there’s one thing I really get crazed about, it’s my privacy. I made my father put a lock on my bedroom door when I was ten. Didn’t we lock ours when we left?”

  “I don’t remember.” Did it make any difference? If someone really wanted to get in to leave this disgusting … thing under her pillow, would a locked door have kept him out?

  Eve glanced out the windo
w. The moon, almost full, was still there, shining down upon campus.

  “This,” Eve said, waving the book and pulling her gaze away from the window to look at Andie, “has something to do with the moon.” She hastily told Andie about the voice at The Snake’s ticket booth. When she repeated how the voice had scolded Eve for being ‘contemptuous of the power of the moon,’ she desperately wanted Andie to laugh. She wanted Andie to point out how hilarious that was, how silly. If Andie would only dismiss it as nonsense, Eve could, too.

  But Andie didn’t do that. Instead, her green eyes opened wider and her freckles stood out in detail as her skin went white. “Eve! That’s horrible! I thought maybe the book cover was just a stupid joke, but now … someone is really mad at you, Eve. Why didn’t you tell me? Aren’t you scared?”

  Disappointed and unsettled by Andie’s reaction, Eve snapped, “No, of course not! It’s all just stupidity, that’s why! Only an idiot would take it seriously.” Liar, she thought. But she was so afraid that if she admitted her fear, it would become real. Then it would gain strength, become stronger than she. She’d fall apart. How could she fight back if she was in pieces, fragmented like the mirrors in the maze? “The power of the moon? Come on, Andie!”

  Andie’s flush told Eve that she, at least, would most certainly have taken the voice seriously. “Well, that’s the second time today that you’ve called other people stupid,” she said coldly, flopping down on her bed to lie on her back staring up at the ceiling. “You said practically the same thing to Alfred in the food tent. I don’t blame him for getting mad, either.”

  “If only I could make Alfred stay mad at me.”

  Andie flipped over on her side, facing the wall, her back toward Eve. “If I were you, I’d take that message you found under your pillow seriously. It looks like some kind of warning to me. But then, you’re not me, are you? You’re not silly and stupid and gullible. You’re … you’re logical! Turn the light off, will you? I need to sleep, and it’s not logical to try to sleep with the light on.”

  Eve knew she had been dismissed. Without ever getting any help or advice about the defaced book cover. She reached over and turned off the light, then she dropped the book on the floor and lay down in her bed. The moon cast silver stripes across the hardwood floor. They lay amid the clutter like an animal skin placed there to warm the feet on a cold winter night.

  Eve lay on her side, staring at the moon-stripes. Andie was mad at her. And for what? For being “logical.” Andie had made that seem almost as bad as being a serial killer.

  How could you live in the world without being logical?

  Eve reached down to pull the bedspread up around her shoulders. If I believed in all that stuff in parapsychology class, she thought resentfully, I’d be terrified all the time. I don’t want people using their minds to read mine, or to send objects flying across the room or set buildings on fire or cast spells. I don’t want anyone in this world to have supernatural powers, not while I’m living in it. That is just too scary.

  Of course none of it was true. None of it.

  Then why was she so terrified? Why was her body trembling under the bedspread even though the temperature was a mild, balmy seventy degrees? Why were her fists clenched so tightly around the edge of the pillow? Why did her heart keep skipping a beat, and why did her feet feel like they were lying in a pool of ice water?

  Because only the Eve she had become dismissed all of parapsychology as utter nonsense. Nell’s perfectly logical daughter would never give a second thought to the idea of the moon having any kind of supernatural power. But the other Eve, the one who had created images in the clouds overhead as she lay under the grape arbor as a child, the one who had made up stories about every person who passed by on the street, the one who, when she read a book or saw a movie with an unhappy ending, had easily changed the ending in her own mind to a more satisfying one, that Eve was the person trembling in her bed in Lester dorm. That Eve still believed that all things, even weird ones, were possible.

  No wonder my mother set out to change me, Eve thought in disgust. This Eve is a helpless, cowering wuss. No one would be able to stand her. I can’t stand her! She certainly would never be elected to anything. She could sit for hours and daydream and draw and write stories and no one would care. No one would expect anything of her because they’d know she wasn’t efficient or organized or responsible or … logical enough to deliver.

  Her final thought before her eyes closed was: But if I were that other Eve, maybe no one would be smashing mirrors in my face and taunting me in the dark and leaving ugly messages under my pillow.

  She fell asleep with her head tilted on the pillow, her face upturned toward the window and the silvery rays of the moon.

  Chapter 14

  EVERYONE’S ASLEEP NOW. I’m out here all alone, just me, so I can talk to you in private. I love being out here alone at night, with nothing but your bright light leading the way. It’s so peaceful, so quiet, so private. I’d stay out here all night, but someone might catch me here and start asking questions.

  Wasn’t the book cover a stroke of genius? I hope Eve understood my message. It’s hard, with narrow, closed minds like hers. Sometimes you just have to hammer them over the head to slip anything inside. Maybe my clever artwork was too subtle for her.

  She can try to pass it off as a joke. But she can’t fool me. The power sees right through her. I know she’s really scared.

  She’ll tell the others. She’ll show them the cover. She’ll laugh and try to make fun of it, but I’ll know what she’s really feeling. And they’re not as skeptical as she is. They’ll see the warning for what it is. That will take care of any remaining doubt she might have about whether it’s a serious message or not. They’ll convince her.

  I can’t wait to see the terror in her eyes then.

  There isn’t another soul out here. Everyone’s asleep. I think I’ll just crawl into one of the Ferris wheel cars and sit there and think about what I’m going to do next. How best to use the power.

  I’ll have to try something else soon. Wouldn’t want her, or any of the rest of them, to relax.

  I love Ferris wheels. So big, so high off the ground, so dangerous, the way the cars swing and sway, especially at the very top. My mother hated them, would never go near one, and wouldn’t let me, either. But I sneaked away from her and rode them, anyway. And after I used the power on her, I could ride anything I wanted, any time, any place.

  Should have used it on her sooner.

  Now, what shall I do next? Let me think …

  Chapter 15

  ANDIE WASN’T IN THE room when Eve awoke to a gloomy Tuesday morning. The campus radio station announced that rain was expected later that day, and Eve thought grimly, Great! Perfect! Just what we need, a nice, drenching downpour, soaking the seats on the rides and turning the carnival grounds into a mucky mire. Perfect! If I believed in curses …

  But she didn’t, of course. Still, if she did believe in them, she would have been convinced that someone on campus was sticking pins into a doll that looked suspiciously like Eve Elizabeth Forsythe.

  The book placed underneath her pillow the night before was still lying on the floor. Eve bent to pick it up. She should show it to someone. But who? The police wouldn’t take it seriously. The committee? Maybe. Alfred wouldn’t laugh. He wouldn’t think it was funny, or harmless. He was already worried about her, wanted to protect her, keep her safe.

  Well, she would keep herself safe, thank you very much. Alfred wasn’t going to become her self-appointed bodyguard.

  She had just tossed the book into the waste-basket when Andie arrived, saying grimly, “Get dressed. Fast. The dean wants to see you. Us. The committee. I think it’s about Boomer. What are we going to tell her? I mean, we don’t know where that dart came from.”

  Eve’s stomach had already been queasy because of the book cover. Now, it somersaulted. What were they going to say to the dean? She would have questions. She would want answers. A p
opular Salem University athlete was in the hospital, and no one on the committee had any idea how that had happened.

  There was no time to confer with the rest of the committee, so, when they were all standing, nervous and uncertain, in the dean’s office, Eve told the simple truth. “We don’t know how that dart got there,” she admitted. “And we don’t know who threw it, or why.” There. She had just confessed that she didn’t know what was going on at the carnival she was supposed to be in charge of. Maybe now the dean would fire her. Relieve her of her duties. Assign someone more capable and trustworthy to take over.

  But when they left the office a few minutes later, Eve was still cochairperson of the Founders’ Day celebration committee.

  “The police believe that what happened yesterday was an accident,” the dean had said. “It looks like that one dart became mixed in with the others during packing. The company will be held responsible for Boomer’s medical bills, and his parents seem satisfied with that. Just to be on the safe side, however, we have employed additional security personnel for the duration of the festivities. All I ask on your part is that you check everything out very carefully before the carnival opens each day. There cannot possibly be a repeat of yesterday’s disaster at any of the game booths.”

  At no time had she said, “And Eve, since you haven’t been doing a very good job, I’ve decided to replace you. I’m sure you can understand why.”

  Eve’s emotions were so mixed when she left the office that she couldn’t be sure which feeling was stronger: disappointment or relief. Besides, one question hadn’t been answered. Even if the metal-tipped dart had accidentally been packed in their box, who had thrown it? Tony hadn’t. Wasn’t that the most important question of all?

  “The dean is really behind us,” Serena commented as they left the building, emerging into a chilly, gray day. “I mean, she could have canceled the whole thing. I’ll bet the board was pressuring her to.”