Student Body (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  “I did know it,” I said, getting out of the car, “once upon a time.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I just stood and watched as he drove away.

  When I got back to my room, Nat was still asleep. She wouldn’t need to know that I’d ever gone near the hospital.

  The next morning, she wasn’t in the room when I forced my eyes open to glance at the clock. It was after ten, late for me. But it was Sunday, and if I wanted, I could stay in bed all day long. I had no plans. I didn’t have to get up if I didn’t feel like it. Maybe I would just hunker down beneath the covers and hide from the world.

  But first, I had to answer a ringing telephone.

  It was Griff, at the garage in town. “Ms. Alexander, that you? Griff here.”

  “I didn’t know you guys worked on Sunday,” I said, dragging myself upright.

  “Why not? Cars break down on Sunday, same as any other day. Listen, Ms. Alexander, you been driving over any rocky roads lately?”

  I wasn’t quite awake yet. Rocky roads. Sounded like ice cream. “No, I haven’t. Haven’t been driving much at all, actually. Why?”

  “Well, you got a hole in your radiator a good-sized cat could crawl through, and it wasn’t there when I checked out your car the other day. Wouldn’t want you to think I’d missed something that important.”

  “A hole? But … but I haven’t driven the car since I brought it back to campus from your place. And I drove home on the highway, not on some back road with rocks in it. Are you positive the hole couldn’t have been there when you worked on the car?”

  An offended silence made its way through the telephone line. “There wasn’t a hole in the radiator when I saw that car,” Griff said stiffly. “This hole here is new, you got my word on that.”

  But that was impossible. How could the car radiator have picked up a big hole when it was sitting in a parking lot?

  And then Griff said, “You ask me, Missy, this hole’s been put here deliberate. Looks to me like someone took maybe a claw hammer, maybe a chisel to your radiator, that’s what it looks like to me. You know any reason why someone would want to do that?”

  Chapter 12

  I STOOD THERE; NEXT to my unmade bed, the telephone in my hand, my eyes on the window overlooking the Commons. I could see people down there, people leading ordinary lives, doing ordinary things just as they always did on a Sunday morning in the spring. Some were jogging, some walking with tennis rackets in hand, some bicycling along the walkways. Two guys in shorts were tossing a baseball back and forth. Ordinary activities. While here, in my cluttered, sunny dorm room, a mechanic was asking me who might have a reason to deliberately wreck my car radiator. All I needed was to have to start explaining to Griff.

  One thing I knew for sure. When you start lying, you’d better be ready to keep it up, because it just snowballs. My snowball was about to get bigger.

  “Oh, you know what, Griff?” I said, “I just remembered. I did take the car out along the river road. The day after you checked it out. I’d completely forgotten. I was sorry the minute I got on that road, because it was awful, hard and rocky, like a dry creekbed. There were some really huge stones on that road. One of them must have been tossed into my radiator. Can you fix it?”

  “’Course. Cost you, though. Take a few days, too. Don’t have what I need here, have to send for it.”

  I’d been saving for a new CD player. That money would now have to pay for a working radiator. But then, I didn’t have much choice; did I?

  “Let me know when it’s done,” I said, and hung up. I went to the window and stood there, looking out. Griff’s question rang in my ears. Did I know anyone who might want to sabotage my car?

  I added a question of my own. Did I also know someone who might want to lock me into a tanning capsule until my skin was the color of blood?

  That depended. Hoop had tons of friends on campus. Had someone figured out that I was at least partially responsible for his tragedy? And wanted to punish me for it? How could anyone possibly know I’d been there that night?

  If I was right, and someone was doing these things deliberately, how could I fight back when I had no idea who it was?

  I felt like a fly trapped in a spiderweb, watching the spider with its long, hairy legs ambling confidently toward me.

  Just like that horrible, creepy thing that had come at me last night from Nightmare Hall’s porch. All wrapped in white, walking like something that had crawled up out of a grave.

  It couldn’t have been real. I’d been upset, just like in the tanning booth, only more so. Upset about what had happened to the car, and about having to climb that long, dark hill up to that gloomy old house, and upset, especially, about seeing Hoop.

  It was probably seeing Hoop that had done it. That, combined with guilt, had sent my imagination into overdrive. If there had really been anything there, Ian and Jess would have seen it when they came outside.

  Maybe those tanning rays really had done something to my brain.

  “What are you staring at?” came Nat’s voice, behind me.

  I hadn’t heard the door open or close. I turned around. She’d brought me coffee, steaming, in a paper cup. I took it and thanked her.

  “Nat,” I said, going over to sit down on my bed amid the tumble of bedding, “do you think anyone knows we were with Hoop Friday night at the park?”

  She sipped her coffee thoughtfully. Then she lifted her head and looked straight at me. “Well, we do,” she said. “We know it. All five of us. And Hoop, of course.”

  Now there was a chilling thought.

  “Well, I know that,” I said irritably. “I meant besides us.”

  She knew about the tanning salon incident; although I was convinced she considered it an accident, but she didn’t know about the radiator yet. Could she explain that away as an accident, too? I didn’t see how.

  Nat stirred her coffee. “No. How could they? Hoop can’t talk yet, right? And he’s the only one who knows. Tory, Bay told me you went to the hospital last night. That was kind of dumb, wasn’t it? That nurse is going to get suspicious if you keep showing up there.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of hot coffee. “Bay? When did you see Bay?” She’d been asleep when I left the room last night. As far as I knew, she hadn’t even been aware that I’d ever gone anywhere.

  “At breakfast. Downstairs.” Nat’s eyes were gray steel as she looked at me. “Tory, you’re not itching to tell someone we started that fire, are you? Bay’s worried that you feel the need to confess.”

  “If anyone’s going to confess,” I said hotly, “it’ll be Mindy. She’s the real weak link, not me.”

  “So, when’s your car going to be fixed?” was the next thing she asked me.

  “Bay told you about that, too?”

  She nodded. “Is that why you asked me if anyone else knew we were in the park when the fire started? Because you think someone wrecked your radiator on purpose? That’s just ridiculous, Tory. First of all, no one knows except five of your best friends, and second, what would be the point of sabotaging your car? I don’t get it.”

  I felt that hot steam hissing out of the radiator and slapping against my seared skin, and winced. I didn’t get it, either, but if making me suffer had been the saboteur’s goal, it had worked.

  Still, how could he have known I would lean too close to the car when I opened the hood? Most people would have been much more careful.

  Of course, if it was someone who knew me really well, they’d know that I don’t always think before I act.

  “Your face looks terrible,” Nat said matter-of-factly. “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” I lied.

  If I had said yes, maybe Nat wouldn’t have said what she did, and then we wouldn’t have argued. Maybe she would have felt sorry for me and saved it for later. “Tory,” she said, a coolness in her voice that I hadn’t heard before, “I’ve worked really hard, practically killed myself to get this far. Becoming a doctor is the most important
thing in my life.” She gave me a long hard look. “I’m not going to give it all up this early in the game just because you’re having an attack of conscience.”

  “Who said I am?” I said defiantly. Why was everyone getting so nervous about me all of a sudden? It was Mindy we were supposed to be worrying about.

  “Bay. You’re making him really jittery, Tory. I think you should go find him and tell him to quit worrying. He’s not acting like himself at all, and I know it’s because he isn’t sure about you. He’s afraid you’re going to fink.”

  What a rotten thing to say. As if I’d ever turn in my best friends. How could she even think that?

  I was so furious, I couldn’t say a word. I also hated the fact that she and Bay had been discussing me behind my back.

  What was happening to all of us?

  I was about to respond heatedly when the phone rang. I snatched it up, grateful for the interruption. Things were bad enough already without Nat and I fighting.

  It was Eli. “Are you alone?”

  Weird. Why would he ask me that? “No.”

  “Meet me downstairs in two minutes. I have to talk to you.”

  I could feel Nat’s eyes on me. She probably assumed I was talking to Bay. Something about Eli’s voice warned me to let her go on assuming it. “What’s wrong?” I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me.

  “Just meet me. Lobby. Two minutes. I’ll explain then.”

  All I told Nat when I’d hung up was that I was going out. I knew she thought I was meeting Bay, and I let her think it. Fewer questions that way.

  As I hurried to the elevator, I couldn’t remember ever having left the room before without telling Nat the truth about where I was going and why. I hadn’t told her about the mummy, either. I’d intended to, but then she’d started in on me, and after that Eli had called.

  But I knew, as I stepped into the elevator and pressed the lobby button, that even if those things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have told her, just as I hadn’t told Bay. I wasn’t sure why. I only knew that I would have kept that to myself.

  And yet it was the kind of thing you told your best friends, wasn’t it? When something scared you half to death, didn’t you share that with your best friends, knowing they would understand and be sympathetic? Even if you yourself weren’t one hundred percent sure that you had actually seen it?

  Why hadn’t I told Nat or Bay?

  Because something was happening to us, to our little group. I’d thought of us as a rock of friendship, solid and unchangeable, but now I could feel the tiny little cracks developing around the edges.

  And as the elevator descended rapidly and the lighted buttons over the door counted off the floors, I had the unshakable feeling that what Eli was going to tell me would only make things worse.

  Chapter 13

  ELI, IN JEANS AND a gray Salem sweatshirt, was leaning against the lobby wall when I stepped out of the elevator. His glasses had slid down slightly on his nose and his long hair was windblown. He grimaced when he saw my face.

  “That burn looks worse this morning,” he said, opening the front door to usher me out into the bright sunshine. “You okay?”

  “I wish everyone would quit asking me that,” I said. “I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, exactly, but I’ll live. Have you heard anything new about Hoop?”

  Eli shook his head. His dark, wavy hair slapped against his shoulders. “Not yet. Listen, there’s a problem.” He sounded worried.

  I almost laughed. Of course there was a problem. There were several problems, all of them looking, at the moment, insurmountable. “Another one? What is it?”

  He glanced around nervously. But no one on the Commons was paying any attention to us. Everyone was busy doing something fun, tossing a ball around, throwing a Frisbee, biking, jogging, running. No one but us was standing on the lawn, stiff as statues, discussing serious problems.

  “I’ve lost my key chain.”

  This time, I did laugh, bitterly. He’d lost his key chain? Hoop was hovering between life and death in the hospital because of a fire we’d let get away from us, I’d been threatened twice now by a monstrous, mummified creature, and Eli was mourning the loss of a key chain!

  “No, you don’t get it,” he said earnestly when I laughed. “I lost it there. At the park. Friday night.”

  I stopped laughing. “Oh, no, Eli, you didn’t! That key chain has your name on it.” I knew that because I was the one who had bought it for him, at Christmas. It was a thick, clear plastic replica of the campus tower with a hole punched in the very top, where the carillon was, for the key chain to slip through. On the reverse side of the tower, I’d had Eli’s name etched into the plastic, because he was constantly losing his keys. That way, if someone found them, they’d know whom to return them to.

  But I hadn’t once imagined that there would come a time when we absolutely would not want those keys found.

  “It was plastic, Eli,” I pointed out. He looked pale. I guessed that I did, too, in spite of my burn. “It would have melted in the fire, wouldn’t it?”

  “If I lost it where the fire was hot enough. But what if I didn’t? What if it slipped out of my pocket somewhere else, maybe in the parking lot? The fire didn’t reach that far. The whole thing could still be intact, just waiting for someone to pick it up and read my name. Even if it did fall out in the fire, the plastic might have melted, but the keys could still be intact. It probably wouldn’t be hard for the police to trace the room key.”

  We did have another problem. “What are you going to do?”

  “I have to go over there. To the park. I have to look for that key chain. I think if it had been found and turned in already, the police would have been knocking on my door by now. There’s still a chance that I can find it. And I don’t want any of the others to know. They’ll panic if they know I left a calling card back there.”

  He trusted only me? Any other time, I would have been pleased. Now, it just seemed like one more ten-ton boulder on the back of my neck. “Eli, that whole area of the park is sealed off. No one’s allowed in there. The fire is probably still smoldering.”

  “Tory, you can’t seal off something as big as a state park. The entrance may be blocked, but we can go in the back way, by the river road. You have to help me. I can’t cover all that ground by myself.”

  If there was one thing I didn’t want to do, it was go back into that park. Not now, not yet. “Why don’t you ask Bay? Or Mindy or Nat? Why me?”

  Eli sighed impatiently. “Bay is acting really weird, Mindy’s been doing nothing but crying her eyes out, and I had a fight with Nat at breakfast this morning. Bay had just told us that you’d gone to the hospital last night, and she made some crack about you turning us all in to the cops. I got mad, because I know you’d never do that, and we had a pretty fierce argument.”

  He had defended me against Nat? That was nice. Had Bay done the same?

  I didn’t think so. The impression Nat had given me was that she and Bay were suddenly on the same wavelength.

  “Thanks, Eli,” I said sincerely. “Okay, I’ll help you look. But we’re going to have to really look casual when we head for the river road, as if we’re going bird-watching or canoeing or something. We don’t want anyone to guess that we’re headed for the park.”

  “Maybe I’d better hold your hand,” he said lightly. “Then it’ll look like we’re going for a nice, romantic walk along the riverbank.”

  I couldn’t help laughing, just a little. “Nice try, Eli.”

  As we walked, I told him about the repulsive “mummy-thing” I’d thought I’d seen. I told him about both times, first at the tanning salon, and then again at Nightmare Hall. I didn’t know why I was telling him when I hadn’t told Bay or Nat. Maybe because I knew he wouldn’t laugh at me, and I also suspected he just might believe me. Eli never discounted things, no matter how bizarre, without considering them carefully first.

  I ended by telling him I was sure I’d imagined the whole t
hing.

  He didn’t laugh, and he didn’t tell me I must have been hallucinating. He took everything I told him very seriously. And he wasn’t so sure I’d imagined it.

  “You’re not the daydreamer type, Tory. Maybe what you saw was real.”

  I didn’t see how it could be. What’s more, I didn’t want it to be real.

  But Eli was talking about it as if he were convinced it had been real. “Well, we know it couldn’t have been Hoop,” he said as we trekked along the river path. “It may have looked like him, but there’s no way he could get out of that bed. Sounds like it was someone trying to make you think it was Hoop. But what for?”

  “All I know is,” I said, “that thing wasn’t coming down those steps to shake my hand. It meant to hurt me. If Jess and Ian hadn’t come outside just then, I don’t think I’d be around to tell you about it now.”

  “What did Bay say about it?”

  “I … I haven’t told Bay yet.”

  “No?” Eli looked pleased. “You told me first?”

  “Well, I wasn’t planning on telling you, either. I’d already decided I’d imagined the whole nasty business. It just sort of spilled out of me.”

  Eli said he didn’t see how we could go to the police just now, and I agreed. And then he said we would just have to keep our eyes open and stick together. I agreed with that, too, and wished it were all five of us sticking together, not just Eli and me. But at least I wasn’t completely alone.

  “Could have been a joke,” Eli said halfheartedly. But I could tell that he didn’t believe that at all. He just didn’t know what else to say.

  Then we were at that part of the path where a side lane veered off into the park. We stopped walking, and hesitated on the edge of the woods, not quite ready to face up to ugly reality.

  If it had been summer, with all of the trees fully leafed out, we wouldn’t have been able to see any sign of the fire from our spot on the path. The trees along the path hadn’t been touched by the heat or flames, and had their branches been covered with leaves, they would have formed a thick, full barrier, protecting our eyes from the devastation.