Dark Moon (Nightmare Hall) (10 page)

“Who knows? Scattered all over the place, I guess. Let’s hope one of them is making sure all of the darts in the dart booth are tipped with rubber suction cups.”

“I already checked,” Alfred said. “I checked every box. There wasn’t a single metal tip in any of them.”

Reassured, Eve decided to make the rounds one more time before the carnival closed. But this time, she took Andie and Alfred with her. If the threatening voice came again, she wanted someone else there to hear it, just to prove to herself that she wasn’t losing her mind.

People
did
lose their minds from stress. From too much responsibility, too many hassles, too much flak. And the breakdown probably happened faster when the person with too much responsibility wasn’t at all suited for it. If you put the wrong kind of engine in a car, it would break down. She was the wrong kind of engine for the Founders’ Day celebration, so maybe she was already breaking down.

Someone
knew
that. Someone had guessed that Eve Forsythe was a phony, and was using that knowledge to hasten her breakdown.

That made Eve angry. Was someone trying to make her think she was hearing voices? Was that the idea? That stupid voice whispering about some silly “power,” was she supposed to think she was imagining that? Well, she wasn’t. And she knew she wasn’t. The voice was really there, and it belonged to someone. Someone human, someone very real.

Who?

Even more puzzling was the question,
Why?

“There you are!” Garth, with Serena, pink cotton candy in hand, beside him. “Don’t tell me, let me guess, Andie. You rode The Snake. That’s why you look such a mess.”

Andie laughed. “You guessed it. Give that boy a prize! There should be a sign on that ticket booth that reads, RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK.”

“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.

“W
HAT
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 window. 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.