Dark Moon (Nightmare Hall) (16 page)

Eve held her breath.
“What?”
she hissed.

“Your name is all over the place. Doodles, everywhere. Eve Forsythe, Eve Forsythe, Eve Forsythe. On notepads on his desk, papers on his bed, on his cork bulletin board. He’s really nuts about you, you know.”

“But … that doesn’t make any sense.” Eve rolled the burrs around in her hand. “If he’s so nuts about me, why would he try to kill me?”

“Because
you’re
not nuts about
him.
You know about guys like that. If they can’t have you, no one can. What probably set Alfred off was seeing you with Garth.”

Eve couldn’t think. She was trying to, very hard, but she couldn’t. Alfred? Well, why not? That made as much sense as anything else. And Alfred believed in all that parapsychology stuff, and had been annoyed when they’d all poked fun, especially her. It was very possible that Alfred believed the moon gave him special powers.

“Do you think this is enough evidence to take to the police?” Serena asked nervously. “Maybe we should go back to the house and see if there’s anything else. But don’t tell anyone we’re going, or Alfred might find out. If he caught us snooping in his room …”

She wanted to go to Nightmare Hall? Just the two of them? Alarm bells went off in Eve’s head. Something wasn’t right …

And then she remembered.

The voice at The Snake had said, “I killed my beloved mother.” She had heard that as clearly as she’d heard that he was going to kill her, too.

Alfred’s mother wasn’t dead. Eve had met both of Alfred’s parents on Parents’ Day. They had both seemed quite hale and hearty.

Serena’s mother, on the other hand, was dead.

Serena was lying about Alfred. And there could only be one reason why she would be lying, and why she would have the darts and the burrs in her possession.

“Okay, Serena,” Eve said calmly, “that’s probably a good idea. We’ll go to Nightmare Hall, just the two of us. We’ll get more proof about Alfred … I’m sure there’s more … and then we’ll go straight to the police. But I left my purse over there on that bench,” she pointed. “Be right back. Don’t go away.”

And she turned, intending to blend into the crowd before Serena could stop her, and find Garth and the others.

But she never got the chance.

Something came down hard on the side of her head, crashing into her temple, and the very bright moon and the black sky and the crowd and the music and the bench where she hadn’t left her purse, hadn’t even brought a purse with her, disappeared into a thick, velvety black void.

E
VE KNEW WHERE SHE
was the minute she came to. As groggy as she was from the blow to her head, she couldn’t mistake that smell.

An attic. She was in an attic, with its strong scent of mothballs, cedar, and that musty odor that always collects at the very top of a house.

And she knew, too, with sinking heart, which attic this was. She remembered it from the tour that Serena had taken them on the night they came for pizza.

Nightmare Hall. She was in Nightmare Hall, in its dark, stuffy attic above the third floor. She remembered it well. Low, slanted ceilings, boxes and old furniture everywhere, garment bags on hangers, and low, squat windows on one side, leading to a rusty old fire escape. She couldn’t see well, but reflected moonlight showed the white lace curtains blowing in the night breeze. The windows were open.

“Well, well, well, look who’s up! Hi, there.”

Eve was lying on the smooth, hardwood floor in the middle of the room. She pushed up on her elbows to peer into the darkness. Her head spun. When she looked up, she saw Serena sitting on a pile of boxes, looking down at her.

“The door is locked, Eve,” she said with pleasure. “It’s just you and me. Isn’t this cozy?”

Eve sat up, leaned against the legs of an old sewing machine. “No, it’s not cozy,” she said coldly. “It’s crazy! What are you
doing?
”

“Well, me and Moon up there,” Serena waved a hand toward the window, “are teaching you a lesson. You made fun of us, Eve. You made fun of the power.”

“I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people did.”

“That’s true. And one of them, Alice, is dead, isn’t she, Eve? And Boomer would have been, if that stupid doctor hadn’t been there. And the rest of them got a lesson in manners last night, didn’t they?”

Eve sat up straighter. “You were
on
that Ferris wheel! You knew something was going to go wrong with it and you got on it, anyway. You must have known you might be killed.”

“Oh, no,” Serena said calmly, “not me. I knew I couldn’t die. I knew the Moon would save me. It’s true, I didn’t really expect to be tossed over the edge. But even when I was, I wasn’t worried.”

“You were terrified. I saw it in your eyes.”

Serena laughed. “Well, maybe I had a little crisis in confidence there for a few minutes. I was
very
high off the ground, Eve. But then I remembered who I was and that nothing terrible could happen to me, and I wasn’t so scared after that.”

“Yes, you were.” Eve’s head moved, studying the room. Moonlight, the very “power” that Serena believed made her invincible, was also providing enough light to see by. And what she could see was that the only way out was through those windows. The thought of the rickety fire escape turned her stomach. But two things she was sure of: It
was
the only way out, and this insane girl in front of her, sitting casually with her legs tucked up underneath her, her hands behind her back, a lazy, smug smile on her face, intended to kill her.

There was absolutely no question about that in Eve’s mind.

“Why do you want to kill me, Serena?” she asked, pulling herself to her feet. “I’ve never done anything to you. Okay, I made fun of those so-called ‘powers.’ But,” she added gently, “you never told me you had any. How was I supposed to know?”

Serena’s smile vanished. “Who said you could stand up? Stay right there, where you are. I didn’t tie you up because you can’t go anywhere with the door locked, but if you make one move …” She lifted the hands she’d been holding behind her to reveal a baseball bat. “I’ll bash in your skull. For good this time.”

“Oh, please.” Eve took a small step sideways. “Don’t be so melodramatic. It just sounds silly.”

Serena jumped from her perch, her face contorted with rage. “See? See how you do that? See how you make fun of people, put them down so easily? You do it all the time, Eve.”

Shaken, Eve stood perfectly still. Did she do that? Was she like that?

“
I
should have headed that committee,” Serena shouted, brandishing the baseball bat perilously close to Eve’s face. “Me! That’s why I wanted it to be this week. The week of the full moon. Because I knew my powers would be strongest then. The Moon helps me. He helped me that first night, with my mother. A shadow moved across him and that was my signal that he was helping me. There’ll be a shadow tonight, too. Any minute now. And I’ll be able to tell when it happens.” She smiled. “So will you, Eve, I promise you that.”

Eve said nothing.

“You really should have picked me to chair the committee,” Serena said. “I could have made this whole week the best celebration ever.” Her lips twisted in a sneer. “Look how
you’ve
fouled it up.”

“You’re right, Serena,” Eve said calmly, taking another step sideways. “But none of us knew about your powers. You should have told us. Then you would have been picked to head the committee instead of me.”

The sneer deepened. “Ha! That’s a big, fat lie! If I’d told you, straight out, you would have laughed your stupid head off. Stop patronizing me, Eve. I don’t like it.”

“How did you kill your mother?” Eve said.

Serena froze. “What?”

“I said, how did you kill your mother? You said that night on The Snake that you’d killed her, and I want to know how. It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone. I mean, you’re not planning on letting me out of here alive, are you?” She had said the right thing. It had shocked Serena, and she wasn’t paying as much attention to Eve’s movements. Another step, and then another, her feet sliding quietly on the hardwood floor.

“I … I
wished
her dead.” Serena’s voice gathered strength. “That’s how I knew I had the power. That was the first time I ever used it.”

“You wished it?” Eve’s words were heavy with skepticism.

“See? There you go again! Yes, I wished it, and it happened. So you can scoff all you want, but I wished it and it happened, and I wished it another time, too, and it happened. Carolyn was supposed to be my friend, my best friend, but she betrayed me, so I had to use the power on her. And it worked.”

“Why didn’t it work on me?” Eve was so close to the window now, the lace curtain brushed against her right arm. Serena didn’t seem to notice. “I mean, I didn’t die in the Mirror Maze, and I didn’t die on The Snake. Maybe your power has blown a fuse.”

Furious, Serena swung the bat. It slammed into Eve’s wrist with a sickening crack. She screamed in pain, and bent double, clutching the injured arm. The blow shocked her. She hadn’t been expecting it. “Oh, God, Serena, what did you do that for?”

“
Stop
making fun of me!” Serena screamed, her face a mask of rage.

When the bright light of the moon suddenly dimmed slightly, darkening the room, Eve couldn’t believe it. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky. But now …

Serena noticed it, too. She ran to the window in the other end of the wall, and looked up at the sky.

When she turned around, she was smiling.

Beaming, really, Eve thought, she’s beaming. There’s a shadow on the moon and she sees it as a signal.

So, even though Eve was dizzy with pain and hadn’t planned what she was going to do or how to go about it, when Serena, still smiling, lifted the bat a second time and broke into a run across the attic floor, headed straight for Eve, Eve had no choice. She dove out the open window and tumbled onto the fire escape.

It let out a screech of protest when her body hit the top landing, and groaned another as she tumbled heavily down the first three steps. The rusty metal stairs trembled with the sudden weight, and when Eve sat up and shook her head to clear it and looked up to see if Serena was following, her eyes widened with horror.

The bolts holding the ancient fire escape to the wall of Nightingale House were pulling loose. There were only four, giant-sized, fastened into the brick.

Only now they weren’t fastened. Two of them had already pulled loose and were hanging limply from the holes in the metal railing of the stairs. As the fire escape began to sway slightly, swinging Eve ever so gently, it pulled and tugged on the two remaining bolts which, Eve noticed with a sinking of her heart, were already loose in their holes.

Serena appeared in the window, her disheveled hair hanging over her shoulders. Her first glance was toward the sky, where the moon remained behind the shadow of a small cloud. Then, smiling, she looked down at Eve, crouched on the swaying iron stairs, her uninjured hand clinging to the railing, the other hand with its broken wrist lying uselessly in her lap.

“Don’t come out here,” Eve warned. “It’s loose. Any more weight and the whole thing will go. Stay there, Serena, or we’ll both be killed.”

“Well, you will,” Serena said blithely, swinging a leg over the windowsill, “but I won’t. I already told you, nothing bad will happen to me. Especially now. Don’t you see that shadow up there, Eve?” glancing up again. “The moon is full now, and that’s when I’m strongest. Not only that, but there’s a shadow, too. That’s the signal it’s ready to give me whatever I want, just like it did before. And what I want most, Eve, is you dead. So that’s what I’m going to have.”

Eve had no choice. Later, she would tell herself that over and over again for a very long time, and others would tell her that, too. I had no choice, she would repeat again and again, until she finally believed it herself.

Serena, still armed with the powerful baseball bat, swung the other leg over the sill and prepared to drop down onto the fire escape.

And Eve shook it. With her one good hand, she gripped the railing and then she pushed her body against the railing with all her strength, sending the iron stairs swinging crazily to the right.

So that when Serena let her body drop, the fire escape that had been there only seconds before, directly beneath her feet, was no longer there.

She missed it only by an inch or two.

But she did miss it.

And went screaming to her death.

Eve, so sickened that she fell to her knees, caught only a glimpse of Serena’s face as she plummeted straight down four stories.

But that glimpse was enough. What Eve saw was a look of total betrayal.

And she knew, as she collapsed in a heap on the metal stairs, that she hadn’t caused that look. It wasn’t Eve, after all, that Serena felt had betrayed her. It wasn’t Eve that Serena had expected to save her. And although it was Eve who had swung the fire escape out of Serena’s way, it wasn’t even Eve she blamed for her own death. It was the Moon.

“C
AN’T SEE THE MOON
tonight,” Garth said quietly into Eve’s hair, which hung loose and full around her shoulders. “Too cloudy. Think that’s why everyone’s having such a good time? The music seems better tonight, people are laughing louder, talking more. Everyone seems more relaxed.”

Eve lifted her head to look up at him. “That isn’t because we can’t see the moon, Garth. That’s because Serena is gone.” She rested her head against his chest again as they continued dancing on the main street of Twin Falls. “Poor Serena. She just totally lost it when her mother died, and no one ever even knew it.”

Andie and Alfred danced by and waved. Although the moon no longer illuminated the streets and buildings, the crowd of dancers, and the river flowing off to the left, Eve decided Garth was right. Saturday night was much nicer than Friday. The air felt warmer, the breeze gentler, the crowd friendlier.

A deep pang of regret stabbed her. If only …

But what good did that do?

“I wish I’d known what was going on in Serena’s head,” she said quietly. “Maybe we could have helped her. It’s so hard to believe she really thought the moon was guiding her, helping her.”