The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) (14 page)

Mike was now on
trial. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, he'd
stubbornly refused to plead guilty. The eyewitness from across the
street had given her account. The handwriting expert had testified
that the ransom note was in Mike's hand. The jury wouldn't have
to deliberate for even one hour.

Harry acted as if he
were indifferent to the efforts of every newspaper reporter to
compare him to his brother and hint that they were a team — his
brother the kidnapper and Harry the killer.

Bianca knew that
Harry couldn't be the killer after the long night that they'd
spent together. She cringed every time some kid called out, "Hey,
Fellini, want to show me your hideout?" or "Where did you stash
that gun that killed the maid?" or "What store are you going to
knock over next?" or "Who's going to be your next victim?" or
"How much of the take does Mike share with his kid brother?"

Harry's brave
example still inspired her. Bianca was ready to go crazy with the
stress of having a murderer who'd threatened her still lurking
about the island. She feared she'd go nuts with the suspense of
memories buried in the murky depths of her unconscious. She felt
absolutely miserable with the tension of not being able to talk to
Harry and share her problems with him. Then she imagined what Harry
and Mrs. Fellini must be going through. She saw how well they were
acting. She told herself that she could put up with whatever she had
to. In fact, it was her duty.

When nobody was
looking, Harry and Bianca exchanged glances. He smiled at her,
tentatively at first, unsure about whether she'd turned against
him. When she smiled back, he looked so relieved that he beamed at
her.

Bianca had missed
many days of school while she'd been in the hospital. There were
lots of exams and papers to make up. No one was sure whether she
would graduate with her class. Her parents had given her permission
to stay after school so long as either they, the Shipleys or Doc
picked her up and she didn't have to walk home. Also, the police
department had to be notified ahead of time to have officers on duty
until everyone had cleared out and gone home.

Bianca's English
teacher wanted her to stay after school to catch up on an essay. The
teacher told her to write about some significant event in her life,
almost blushing while she gave the assignment. Everyone on the whole
island knew what had happened in Bianca's life. She was to spend
forty-five minutes on the essay, then leave the paper face-down on
the teacher's desk. She was to note the time she had finished at
the top.

"Sorry I can't
stay here at my desk while you finish, Bianca," Mrs. Topley
apologized in her deep, Georgia accent. "I must pick up my little
girl at day care. Do you think you'll be all right? I mean, the
police are still out in front of the school, but you can't be too
careful these days."

"Of course!"
Bianca reassured the nervous teacher. "Doc's supposed to pick me
up in forty-five minutes. I couldn't be in safer hands. Hey, if he
notices anything funny, he'll raise a ruckus. He'll have the
police, fire department and ambulance here in the classroom in one
minute."

"Doc's a gem,
isn't he?" Mrs. Topley slipped her purse strap over her shoulder.
"When I had him in senior English eight years ago, he was the most
reliable student in the class. I could always count on him to manage
things when I had to leave the room for a few minutes. Everything was
in tip-top shape when I returned."

The lights went out.

"Oh, I'm sorry!"
Mrs. Topley blushed, turning the lights back on. "I must have left
my brain in deep freeze today."

Bianca felt uneasy
when Mrs. Topley closed the door to the basement classroom behind
her. She was hardly able to concentrate on writing. She kept on
hearing sounds that she'd never noticed before. She looked up,
panicked. The fish tank in the front of the room was bubbling. A fly
was buzzing too close to her ear. The floor creaked, as old buildings
do when their foundations are settling.

She was almost
finished with whatever she was writing. She didn't remember what it
was about. It was pure gibberish.

Then the lights went
out again. This time they didn't come back on either.

She told herself to
keep calm. It was probably a power outage, though there hadn't been
any thunderstorms today, despite the oppressive, humid atmosphere.
Maybe some car had run into a pole. When she heard footsteps slowly
approaching her from the back of the room, however, she knew she was
in big trouble.

Mrs. Topley didn't
walk like that. In fact, nobody she had met walked like that —
except one person. Now she remembered for the first time that the
nameless, faceless killer walked like that, the one she'd
encountered once before on the stairs at the Shipleys' house. Those
footsteps echoed through her mind, evoking vivid memories of that
night two years ago.

If only she could
remember that face!

"I'm not very
pleased with you, Bianca!" the voice behind her hissed.

It was that low,
whispery hiss that she'd heard in the ladies' rest room in the
movie theater! It made shivers go up and down Bianca's spine.

"What — what have
I done wrong now?"

How had this goon
gotten in here? The police were outside. Doc was probably pulled up
to the curb in his car waiting for her, watching everybody enter and
leave the school. The building secretary, Mrs. Higgins, had been
instructed not to let anyone enter or leave without showing
identification. You couldn't get into the school without passing by
the building secretary's desk. Mrs. Higgins had eagle eyes, and
there was always a police officer with her.

At this time of day
all the other entrances and exits were locked since the recent
kidnapping of Little Katie Shipley. Policemen were guarding them as
well.

If the killer was one
of the students, such as Rick Roscoe, how did they dare to attempt
this? The district attorney was ready to pounce as soon as he had a
scrap of additional evidence against him!

"Isn't it obvious
what you've done, Bianca?" The voice whispered. "I don't like
reading those descriptions in the paper that you gave to the police.
I don't want to hear about dark eyes, big hands and loud
footsteps."

She hadn't had any
choice. They had bombarded her with questions. Doc had persisted
until he'd wrung every last little memory out of her.

Bianca had to come up
with some explanation, any explanation, to get out of this fix. "I
— I didn't really mean what I said. It sounded good, and I had to
say something."

"Now, Bianca, you
can lie better than that!"

The soft, silky purr
hissed next to her ear. "Those descriptions are too close to the
truth, and you know it."

Part of her was glad
to know that. At least she hadn't been hallucinating. Her memories
were genuine. The more genuine they were, the more dangerous it was
for her, though.

"I don't like
reading about the night of the murder — what happened first and
what happened second. Soon you'll remember everything. Then it will
be curtains for you."

She swallowed hard.

"I've got to
teach you a lesson, Bianca."

It sounded as if he
were putting on gloves. She could feel his finger tracing its way
down her neck. She shuddered. The hands of darkness were reaching out
for her.

Something flashed in
front of her face. It looked just like a gun.

Bianca's nerves
snapped. She stumbled around, banging against desks and chairs until
she was out of the room and racing down the hallway.

She screamed as she
nearly ran right into Rick Roscoe. Where had he come from? Had he
been the creep in the room? Rick whispered something she couldn't
quite hear. Then he went to his locker and seemed to be getting books
out. He glowered at her in warning.

Bianca darted into
the first room she came to. The lights were out. She didn't know
where the switch was located. The floor sounded as if it were wooden
and no longer tile. She banged into something big and leathery at
about waist level and climbed over it.

Suddenly she realized
she was in the gym. That was the "horse" that they used to vault,
run and jump over. She was banging into equipment scattered about in
the gymnasium.

She ran up against
something long and narrow, and jumped up on to it. It was hard to
hold on to. She didn't know how she was supposed to walk on this.
She crawled, realizing at the last minute that she was on the balance
beam. Every minute she was conscious of someone following her. She
could hear heavy breathing. It sounded as if someone were breathing
down her neck he was so close.

Her hands were so
sweaty she could hardly hold on to the wooden beam. She didn't dare
fall. She would be a goner. The guy grasped on to her ankle and
pulled her backward. She leaped off the beam. She fell clumsily to
the floor and scrambled to her feet.

Bianca ran into
something so big she couldn't get around it. She had to climb up on
to it instead. She was scrambling across it as it sagged down in the
middle and swayed from side to side. The trampoline! The guy leaped
down on top of her. The impact made them bounce up and down together
as he got his big hands encased in gloves around her neck.

"You'll learn,
Bianca!" the guy hissed.

The darkness itself
had reached out to strangle her. She screamed.

Somehow Bianca
managed to get away from the freak. She ran smack into a wall. There
was a door. She turned the knob. She emerged into another room, a
big, cavernous one. Her footsteps echoed against concrete. It was so
dark that she didn't know where she was until she plunged headlong
into the deep end of the high school pool.

She was thrashing
about in her clothes, her heavy tennis shoes dragging her down. Arms
closed around her waist. They were sinking down to the bottom of the
pool together. She kept breaking loose and surfacing, only to be
yanked down again.

Bianca didn't have
any strength left. The creep was dragging her out of the pool. They
were on the deck.

"Bianca!" He
hugged her to him.

Harry!

"What on earth
happened? I heard you screaming. I was at my locker. I came as soon
as I could."

The lights came on.
There stood Doc and the police along with the district attorney. A
reporter stood behind them flashing pictures.

"I came to pick
Bianca up. I was walking down the hall toward her classroom. I heard
screaming and summoned the police in from the parking lot at once,"
Doc explained. "Fellini's been chasing her around the school
trying to murder her because she's remembering too much."

Bianca protested.
"Harry rescued me from the pool. The killer was chasing me around
the school trying to strangle me."

"Sorry, Miss
Winters," an officer spoke up. She recognized him as the policeman
who had been stationed in the front office that morning. "We've
found other incriminating evidence. We'd just gotten the call from
the chief to arrest Harry Fellini right before Dr. McCollough
summoned us."

"What other
evidence?" Harry sounded bold and brash, even defiant.

"We obtained a
warrant to search your house today while you were at school. We found
some mighty suspicious evidence right under your bed."

"That's
impossible! It must have been planted!" Harry proclaimed.

"The police told me
that they found a map there," Doc added.

"So what?"

Bianca swallowed
hard. She feared what was coming next.

"It was a map of
the Shipleys' house, with details of how to get to their bedroom.
Mrs. Shipley's jewelry box or her furs were your target two years
ago when you shot Mrs. Ingersoll and pushed her down the stairs."
Doc pronounced doom on Harry. "Wound around the map was a lock of
Mrs. Ingersoll's hair."

Chapter 11

"I'm going to set
Harry Fellini's bail at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,"
announced Judge Hopkins.

Mrs. Fellini, wearing
an old housedress with a raincoat thrown over it, shrank down in her
seat at the defendant's table. Harry and his mother were broke.
Mrs. Fellini had no way to pay one red cent. She huddled next to the
court-appointed attorney for indigents and dabbed her eyes with a
Kleenex, sniffling and blowing her nose.

The court-appointed
attorney, a young man in his twenties, was playing Solitaire. He'd
given up on the case. Now that DNA analysis of Mrs. Ingersoll's
hair had confirmed that it belonged to the dead lady, he'd decided
that the evidence against his client was overwhelming. He glanced up
at the judge and Harry, then looked back down at his cards.

The black-robed judge
with a balding head and wrinkled-up face scolded Harry. "You were
lucky to be able to go home when they dragged you before me for
playing cemetery pranks. Now you've been stupid enough to assault
Miss Bianca Winters — not to mention leaving incriminating evidence
under your bed. I'm going to put you in jail while you're
awaiting trial. Since you're eighteen, it won't be the detention
home for juveniles. Do you have anything to say?"

Judge Hopkins
glowered at Harry. He resembled one of those ugly gargoyles that
stared down from Neo-Gothic buildings. Looking at his face was a
punishment in itself.

"Judge Hopkins, I
didn't murder Mrs. Ingersoll. I didn't assault Bianca. I wouldn't
do that for the world. I — I love her!"

Harry turned around
and gazed toward where Bianca herself was sitting in the first row of
seats.

Mrs. Fellini
suppressed a sob. The defense attorney didn't look up. He coughed
and continued playing cards.

Bianca blushed hotly.
She kept staring at Harry until her eyes burned, silently cheering
him on. Even in a tough situation like this, he was providing a
perfect example of how she ought to behave.