Gallows Hill (18 page)

A small black missile came streaking out of the darkness as if propelled by a demon's slingshot. Sarah opened her mouth to scream, and then, as the creature wrapped itself around her ankles, she began to giggle in hysterical relief.

"What are you running from?" she asked. "Do they scare you too?"

She bent and gathered up Yowler, clutching him tightly against her chest, gathering comfort from his furry warmth.

"My security dolly," she whispered. "I should have named you Dorcas." She buried her face in his neck and giggled even harder. She was losing control, and felt as if she might be going crazy. Or maybe she already was crazy. Did crazy people realize they had lost their senses? Was it possible she was insane and just didn't know it? Could something have snapped in her brain one night while she was sleeping so that she woke up in the morning no longer able to discriminate between what was real and what was imaginary?

"Sarah!" Ted called from the living room. "Either go out or stay in, but shut that door. You're letting in the cold."

Sarah closed the door and carefully locked it. Then, with Yowler still in her arms, she went down the hall to her bedroom. The essence of Kyra came billowing out to greet her, even though Kyra's physical self was elsewhere. The scent of her cloying perfume had seeped into the curtains and bedspreads so that, with every breath that Sarah took, Kyra seemed to be invading her lungs. Kyra's rosebud pajamas lay tossed in a heap on her pillow, despite the fact that there was a perfectly good drawer for her to put them in, and the top of the bureau was littered with her half-used lipsticks and little jars of freckle cream. A splotch of her tacky pink nail polish decorated the throw rug between the beds, like blood from an anemic vampire.

Very deliberately Sarah placed Yowler on Kyra's bed.

"Shed on the pillow!" she directed him.

Yowler immediately leaped down, as if he wanted no contact with the bed, and Sarah didn't blame him.

Thinking of the car across the street, she adjusted the window blinds so that there was no possible way anyone could see in. Then she placed a tape in her player and adjusted the volume, filling the room with the dreamy lilt of panpipes and the soothing ripple of a harp. She switched off the overhead fixture and clicked on the bedside lamp, draping Kyra's pajamas over the shade to dim the light.

Then she went over to her desk and picked up the paperweight.

"Here goes nothing," she told herself nervously as she deliberately stared into its depths, willing the pictures to come even as she dreaded them.

"Show me the faces of the people in that car," she said softly, to whom she did not know. To the ball itself? To God? To her own subconscious? "Show me their faces," she whispered again. "I want to see their faces."

It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, before it happened. All she knew was that her head was beginning to ache and her eyes were blurring with the strain of keeping them focused on the center of nothing, when the strange gray swirls began to appear in the glass. She held her breath as she watched them shifting about—forming, dissolving, and re-forming like clouds in a windstorm—until at last a picture began to appear to her, a picture that she had not asked for.

With a moan of horror she let the ball drop from her hands.

The picture was of a girl with long dark hail—a tall, slender girl who looked very much like Sarah.

The girl had a noose around her neck.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

She tried not to fall asleep, because she did not want to dream, and she could tell by the tug of her eyelids that a dream awaited her. It was there ahead of her, poised at the edge of her mind, impatient for the bars of consciousness to drop so that it could attack her.

Her eyelids won, and she finally let them fall closed. The instant her brain let go, the dream was upon her, angry at having been kept waiting, sucking her into its depths and making her a part of it.

She was standing at the edge of a crowd, but—wait—was she standing? No, she was seated on shoulders—the broad, strong shoulders of somebody who loved her, for the hands that were gripping her ankles were gentle and reassuring.

In front of her, teetering on the topmost rung of a ladder, there stood a woman with a hangman's noose around her neck. The other end of the rope was looped around the branch of a massive oak tree. From her seat on high, Sarah could look across the heads of the people in front of her and stare straight into the woman's terrified eyes.

This was not the girl in the crystal ball; this woman was older and frailer, with pallid skin, as if deprived of the sun for months. Still, when the woman glared back at her, Sarah knew her, and the hatred she saw in those eyes transcended the fear in them.

"I want to get down!" Sarah whimpered. "Papa, please, put me down!"

But the man on whose shoulders she sat did not seem to hear her.

"This is a day of celebration!" he was shouting. "Blessings upon you, my brethren! Our Lord awarded you the duty of exposing and destroying those worshipers of Satan, who have dwelt among us disguised as our friends and neighbors, and you have obeyed His commandment!"

"I didn't mean it," Sarah whispered. "I didn't really mean it."

But again the man did not hear her.

He turned to the woman on the ladder and bellowed, "Confess, witch!"

"I am no more a witch than you are, Reverend!" the woman screamed at him.

There followed a moment of silence in which it seemed that nobody breathed, a moment in which all motion appeared to be suspended, as if a projector had frozen on a single frame of a movie too horrible to continue. Then the projector abruptly sprang back into action as the hangman shoved the woman from the ladder and the hysterical cheers of the crowd blasted Sarah awake.

Those sounds continued as she lay there, shuddering in the darkness, wondering if she had brought back the sound track from the dream and would continue to hear it ringing in her ears for all eternity. Then, with relief, she realized that she was hearing Yowler, who was making the distinctive demands for attention that had earned him his name.

Still shaken and sick from the nightmare, Sarah got out of bed and stumbled across the dark bedroom to the door and down the hall to let the cat out into the front yard. Then she returned to bed, and again felt sleep overwhelming her, but this time she gratefully sank into dreamless oblivion. She slept the rest of the night as heavily as if she had been drugged with sleeping pills, waking again at last to a rap on her door.

When she didn't respond, the door opened and Rosemary came in.

"Sarah," she asked softly, "are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Sarah said in a voice muffled with sleep.

"You normally don't sleep in like this. It's after eleven."

"I didn't sleep well last night," Sarah said. "I'm catching up."

"Ted and I are getting ready to take his kids out to lunch. Are you sure you don't want to come with us?"

"After last night?" Sarah asked incredulously.

"I just thought—oh, honey, I'm sorry that things got out of hand that way. There has to be some explanation...."

"There is," Sarah said. "It's that everybody else is lying, and I'm telling the truth. The truth right now is that I want to go back to sleep." She flipped over onto her side with her back to her mother, and after a long period of silence she heard the door click closed.

She tried to burrow back into sleep, but this time it was impossible. She finally gave up the effort and simply lay there with her eyes closed, listening for sounds of Ted and Rosemary's departure. It was only after she heard Ted's car go crunching out of the driveway that she got up and opened the blinds. The broad light of day revealed nothing fearsome, either outside or inside the bedroom. There was no mysterious vehicle stationed at the curb. The nightmare had been only a replay of a chapter from a book that she planned never to open again. The paperweight lay on the desk where she had dropped it the night before, an innocent globe of clear crystal, converting the sunbeams that streamed through the window into rainbows.

Sarah pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and went out to the kitchen. A box of doughnuts sat open on the table, and Rosemary had left a pot of coffee on the warmer. Yowler appeared out of nowhere, demanding his own brunch. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sipped it as she opened a can of cat food.

Everything seemed so normal. The tick of the wall clock that had been in their kitchen in California. The aroma of Rosemary's overly strong coffee, enhanced with a dash of vanilla. The purr of the tattered-eared cat, reacting to the buzz of the electric can opener. Was it possible that last night had been as terrifying as she remembered?

"It was all in my head," Sarah told herself, knowing that it wasn't.

A friendly ding-dong shattered the silence of the house.

Sarah jumped at the unexpected sound. In the three months they had lived there, the only time she had heard the sound of the doorbell was when Eric had come by to pick her up. Aside from that, there had been nobody who called on them, not even a cosmetics salesman or a door-to-door missionary. For all practical purposes, she and her mother were pariahs.

Setting the coffee cup down, she went into the entrance hall and peered out through the peephole. The face she saw there, distorted as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, was nevertheless familiar and nonthreatening.

She quickly unlocked the door and opened it.

"Whatever you're selling, we don't want any," she said to Charlie, trying not to reveal how glad she was to see him.

"Oh, I think you do," he said easily. "I got my paycheck this morning, and I'm here to fill your wallet with beautiful green stuff. Besides, I couldn't wait until Monday to hear what happened when you told your folks about the crow."

"Come on in," Sarah said. "I've got the house to myself for a change." She led him back to the kitchen and motioned him into a chair. "Help yourself to a doughnut. I'm really glad you came by. But—number one, you don't have to fill my wallet; let's split the money. And—number two—Ted didn't believe a thing I told him. Not about the crow, and not even about the fortune-telling. As for my mother, she didn't stick up for me. I couldn't prove anything. Eric and Kyra denied everything."

"I'll back you up," Charlie said.

"That wouldn't do any good. You didn't see the crow, I just told you about it, and you never went to Ted's apartment. For all you know, I was making everything up. The worst of it is, I think Ted's convinced my mother that I'm crazy. No, actually, that's not the worst of it." She forced herself to speak the words that had been lurking like monsters in a hidden closet of her mind. "The worst of it is that I'm starting to believe that he's right."

"That's stupid," Charlie said. "You're anything but crazy."

"If I'm not, then that's even worse." Sarah's voice was shaking. "That would mean I'm a witch, just like Debbie and Misty and the rest of them seem to think I am. When I stare into that crystal ball, I see things! It's not a pretense, Charlie! I mean, some of it is, but not all of it. I see future events, and they happen!"

"I know," Charlie said.

"You know? But how—?"

"When you told my fortune at the carnival, you looked into that ball and saw somebody trip me. It startled you so much that you couldn't even finish the reading."

"But I was wrong," Sarah said. "You told me you stumbled on the stairs."

"I lied," Charlie said.

"You lied!" Sarah exclaimed. "But why? Were you trying to protect somebody?"

"Myself." Charlie couldn't meet her eyes. "Even fat people have their pride. It's embarrassing to admit to a pretty girl that you're the school goat that the kids play tricks on."

"Then I am a witch," Sarah whispered, beginning to tremble. No wonder her classmates were drawing back from her in horror! No wonder they wanted to drive her out of their town!

"That's ridiculous," Charlie said, "You're no more a witch than those people who were hanged in Salem. The people who convicted them were victims of mass hysteria. When they came to their senses, they realized the 'afflicted children' were liars. In the next set of trials everybody was found innocent, and Governor Phips released all the people who were in prison."

"But if this thing that I'm doing isn't witchcraft, then what is it?"

"It's called scrying," Charlie said. "Like I told you once, the crystal ball has no magical powers. It's just a tool for meditation."

"I don't understand," Sarah said, feeling slightly less terrified. "What's 'scrying'? I've never even heard of it."

"Lots of people see visions when they stare into shiny surfaces like crystals, or mirrors, or bodies of water," Charlie explained. "Remember how the West Indian servant taught Betty Parris and her cousin how to break an egg into a glass of water to see visions of their future husbands? They were using the white of an egg in a clear container as a substitute for a crystal ball. When people stare into something intently like that, they're more than likely to see images. For people with psychic ability, those images may sometimes reflect past or future events. There's nothing supernatural about it, it's just what happens."