House of Reckoning (17 page)

Ten minutes later they’d shouted their orders into the little speaker and waited for the carhop to bring their food.

“So,” Tiffany said, leaning back against the passenger door of Conner’s car and getting right to the point. “I’ve got more of those little blue jobbies.”

“How much?” Conner asked.

“Ten bucks each,” Tiffany said.

“Ten bucks?” Elliot Nash complained. “Oh, man, I don’t have any money.”

“Bobby does,” Conner said, and glanced at Bobby in the rearview mirror. “Loan me twenty bucks, dude?”

“You haven’t paid me the last twenty I loaned you.”

“I will,” Conner said. “I’ve got money at home. I’ll pay this afternoon.”

“Liar,” Bobby grumbled, but still fished out his wallet and handed Conner a twenty.

“Can I borrow ten?” Elliot pleaded. “Please.”

“This is why I stock the shelves at Wal-Mart?” Bobby demanded, but handed Elliot the ten. “But you guys are going to pay me back this time,” he added. “Both of you.” His eyes bored into Conner West’s reflection in the mirror, but Conner only shrugged.

“Didn’t I just tell you I would?”

Tiffany took the money from Bobby Fendler, tucked it deep into her backpack, then doled out four blue capsules, two for Conner and one for each of the boys in the backseat.

The food arrived, but suddenly Conner wasn’t hungry anymore—the pills in his hand were already talking to him. Tiffany seemed to read his mind.

“Don’t even think about taking that until after you drop me at the mall out by the prison,” Tiffany said.

“Whatcha going to do after the mall?” Conner asked.

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Nothing with you—you’ll be so stoned you won’t even be able to get in trouble.”

Conner grinned, and dropped the pills into his shirt pocket. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to get in any trouble with Tiffany Garvey, but so what? Who needed Tiffany?

There were plenty of other ways to make trouble.

Sarah sat at her art table and eyed the still life Miss Philips had arranged on the table: a crystal ball, fruit, a silver teapot, and a black-and-white china teacup edged in silver on a matching saucer, all laid out on a checkered cloth, the monochromatic pattern reflected in the mirrorlike polish of the teapot. A spotlight that Bettina Philips had set up to the right of the arrangement cast shadows and reflections everywhere, making the exercise one in executing light and shadow as well as portraying the still life itself.

Sarah decided she’d start by sketching the crystal ball, since it was totally in the foreground as everything else was slightly hidden behind it, but her fingers refused to pick up the charcoal pencil. Instead they hovered over the oil pastels, and without thinking about it, she picked up the medium brown.

With broad strokes, she centered the tabletop two-thirds down from the top of the page, but as she looked at the paper, she realized the light didn’t come from the side as Miss Philips had indicated; it came from the big windows to the south, behind the man—

Wait a minute.

What man?

And what windows?

She looked up, and the still life was exactly as it had been a moment ago.

Nothing had changed at all.

But when she looked back at the paper—

It was as if there was an image inside the paper itself, trapped beneath its surface, struggling to get out.

Or trapped in her own mind, projecting itself onto the paper, demanding that she give it form and expose it to the light.

No longer thinking about what she was doing, Sarah let her hand move as if by its own volition, losing herself in the strange world she was creating.

Except she wasn’t creating it—it was real; it existed somewhere, or had existed, or would exist, or—

Her hand moved faster, picking up one color after another, filling the paper with shapes and colors in bold, sure strokes, the classroom around her fading from her consciousness as her mind focused solely on the image that was quickly taking shape on the paper.

In his math classroom on the second floor, Nick Dunnigan’s knuckles turned white as his fingers clamped the edges of his desk while he tried to keep the pain in his head at bay. But it wasn’t working.

And this afternoon it wasn’t just the voices raging at him, but something else as well.

A dog!

A dog that was howling in either fury or in agony or both. And one of the voices was growing, rising above the rest, erupting with a hideous laughter that slashed through Nick’s mind like a ripsaw.

As the screeching laughter built and the dog’s howling grew along with it, Nick saw a flicker of motion at the periphery of his vision and felt his guts twist in fear at what might come next. A second later it
was there—a huge yellow dog, leaping toward him out of a strange blackness, its mouth gaping, its fangs dripping with saliva, its fury still boiling from its throat.

As the howling grew and the maniacal laughter reached a crescendo, the throbbing in Nick’s head threatened to explode his skull, and the yellow mass that was the dog exploded into a blaze of crimson that wiped everything else from his sight.

Whimpering against the hell into which he was quickly descending, Nick Dunnigan offered up a silent prayer of deliverance.

Deliverance for himself, and for the howling dog as well, for now, as his vision began to fade, the fury in the dog’s fading howl drained away into nothing more than a dying gurgle.

Sarah’s head snapped up as Bettina Philips rose from the chair behind her desk and clapped her hands twice. “All right, we only have a few minutes left, so let’s start cleaning up our tables and putting things away.”

Sarah’s eyes shifted from the teacher to the clock on the wall—was it possible the class was almost over? But it couldn’t be—she’d only been working for a few minutes! Yet there it was: in four more minutes the final bell of the day would ring.

Then her gaze shifted again, to the sheet of paper spread out on the table in front of her.

No, she thought. I couldn’t have drawn this—I couldn’t!

Silence dropped over Nick like a shroud, wiping away the hallucinations as completely as it cut off the voices in his head. Yet even with his eyes closed, he could still see the image of the dying dog, etched into his memory forever. He tried to close it out, banish it as he was banishing the tension that had strained every muscle in his body. He sat unmoving, his spine ramrod straight, his eyes focused on a spot directly ahead. He could feel his classmates looking at him and starting to whisper among themselves, but he didn’t care. All he wanted was one thing.

He wanted to see Sarah Crane.

He
needed
to see her.

Sarah stared at the drawing in front of her, the shock of what she had done hitting her with the force of a baseball bat.

Barely able to breathe, her eyes fixed on the sepia-brown image of a screaming man, his arm in the jaws of a pain-crazed dog whose intestines had exploded from its belly and were spilled across a table in a swath of crimson-tinged gore. In his hand, the man held a scalpel still dripping with blood and glinting in the sunlight refracted from the tall windows behind him.

A terrible numbness began to spread through her. How could she have done this? And worse, what would Bettina Philips think when she saw it? Quickly folding the drawing in half before anyone else could get even a glimpse of it, she thought quickly.

“Any questions?” Miss Philips asked the class.

The bell rang and everybody stood up, eager to get out of the building for the day.

“Put your drawings on my desk,” she said over the growing din of the students already preparing for their release from school. “And don’t forget to put your names on them.”

As the students started making their way toward the front of the room, Sarah hung back, folded her drawing again and slipped it deep into her backpack.

Nobody—nobody at all—was going to see this drawing.

Except that even as the thought formed in her mind, she knew it wasn’t true.

One person would see the drawing.

She needed to find Nick.

She needed to find him now.

Nick knew something was wrong as soon as he saw Sarah coming down the main staircase. Her face was ashen and her limp even worse than usual, but he said nothing until he pushed one of the school’s heavy front doors open and they were both in the bright sunlight outside. “What’s going on?” he asked, relieving her of her backpack as they started down the stairs. “Are you sick?”

On the sidewalk, Sarah shook her head, taking a deep breath of the
frosty air. “I just had a weird experience in art class—I mean, like,
really
weird! Remember how I told you about getting so lost in drawing a picture that I hardly even remembered doing it?” Nick’s pulse quickened but he only nodded, saying nothing. “Well, this afternoon the drawing was even worse than the one last night,” Sarah said as they crossed the street. “It was awful,” she went on, and shuddered as they kept walking. “I mean,
really
awful.”

Nick stopped and turned to face her, and Sarah stopped, too. “Did you turn it in?”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding?”

“So where is it?” he asked, and when Sarah hesitated, he knew she had it with her. “Let me see it.”

Her eyes met his for a moment, and he thought she was about to refuse. But instead of shaking her head she tilted it toward her backpack, looped over his shoulder. “It’s in there—way down at the bottom.”

Nick unzipped the top and pulled out a folded piece of heavy art paper, then hesitated, no longer sure he actually wanted to see it. But he knew that whether he wanted to see the drawing or not, he had to.

He had to know
.

Struggling to keep his fingers from trembling, he unfolded the sheet of paper and looked at the image.

“Oh, jeez …” he whispered, his voice trailing off as he took in the nightmarish image of an eviscerated dog attacking its tormentor. When he’d taken in every detail, he folded it up again and shoved it back into Sarah’s backpack.

She stared at him, waiting for him to say something, but instead he just began walking again. She fell in beside him, and for several minutes neither of them spoke. Then, when they were three blocks from the school, Nick broke the silence. “I saw what you drew,” he said softly. Then: “I even heard the dog.”

Sarah gazed at him, thinking she knew what he meant but hoping she was wrong. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, you saw—”

“I heard a dog howling. I mean, really screaming. And then I saw it, too. This huge, yellowish dog, coming right at me and—”

“When?” Sarah broke in. Again she was certain she knew and tried to cast around for something else.

Something other than the truth.

“You mean last night?” she went on.

Nick shook his head, as she knew he would. “Just now,” he said, his voice low. “My last period—math class. I had this horrible hallucination. At least I thought it was a hallucination. But—” He hesitated, trying to find some other explanation, but found nothing. “It was like I was seeing and hearing what you were drawing.
While you were drawing it!”

Sarah stopped walking, his words hanging between them. “I—I don’t understand,” she said quietly.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything there was a screeching of tires, and then a car slammed to a stop in the street next to them.

Conner West was behind the wheel, and Elliot Nash and Bobby Fendler rode with him. The way Conner was leering at them told Nick he was stoned.

Or drunk.

Or both.

He was just reaching out to take Sarah’s hand, to lead her away, when Conner slid out of the driver’s door, slammed it, and came around the front of the car and on to the sidewalk, to stand facing them. Conner’s shoulders were slouched, his hands on his hips. “What are you two doing here by my house?” he demanded.

At the sound of Conner’s voice, a big German shepherd came bounding around from behind the house Conner was pointing at, barking wildly, then ran back and forth along the cyclone fence between the house’s front yard and the sidewalk.

With the dog’s first loud bark, the voices in Nick’s head came alive, chattering as insanely as the dog was barking, but he couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

There were too many of them, and they were too loud, and the dog was howling now and—

Elliot Nash and Bobby Fendler got out of the car too, and Sarah shrank back as they started toward her, their eyes glazed, their lips twisted into dangerous smirks.

Nick struggled against the chaos rising in his head, but before he could formulate a word, Sarah took him by the arm. “C’mon,” she whispered. “Let’s just go.”

His hand in Sarah’s, he took a step forward, but Conner moved to block him.

“Just leave us alone,” Sarah said to Conner.

“Why should we?” Conner snarled back. “I’m asking you again. Who said you could be here, next to my house?”

The dog was still racing along the cyclone fence, barking furiously.

Sarah hesitated, but as she gazed at the three boys, she suddenly decided she’d had enough. “Do you own the sidewalk?” she asked.