The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) (2 page)

Already the nightmare
was beginning to fade. She saw only bits and flashes here and there.

It made her feel
excited and terrified at the same time.

Bianca started to
scramble out of her seat. Then she sat back down. She had to wait
until the movie was over. It wouldn't be polite to desert Rick.
After all, he'd paid for her ticket, as well as the refreshments.

Bianca tapped her
foot and glanced down at the luminescent dial on her wristwatch. Doc
had warned her to expect her memory to return at some point. He'd
advised her that she ought to get out and start to see more kids her
own age, too — lead a normal life. That might help her to remember.

Still, to have her
memory return on the very first night that she'd gone to a movie in
two whole years, on her very first real date! That was weird!

Now all the kids in
the theater were putting their hands over their mouths. They were
screeching as if they loved to be scared to death by the movie.

Suddenly Mrs.
Ingersoll's voice ripped across Bianca's mind: "Help! Help!"

Bianca screamed
aloud. She didn't know how to handle this — a memory here and
there, like some sort of loose cannon rolling across her mind.

"Isn't this fun?"
Rick stuck a box of popcorn in Bianca's face as everyone else
screamed. The popcorn, gooey with butter, came in a tub so big that
Bianca couldn't hold it without spilling it. Her date's face was
flushed with enthusiasm, illuminated in the weird, white light coming
from the big screen until it looked garish.

"Sure thing!"
Bianca managed a sick smile.

Bianca had made a
habit of avoiding movie theaters and other dark places over the past
two years since the slaying. She didn't know what had gotten into
her to act so impulsively. She should have said that she wanted to go
to a restaurant, a dance, a bowling alley, or another bright,
well-lit place.

She had wanted to
impress Rick by going to a movie. She had wanted to convince him that
she was like other girls, not some geek. Now look what had happened!

Marianna Haynes was
leaning over the seat on the aisle in front of Bianca. She worked at
the concessions stand and was bringing popcorn to some kids. She
turned in Bianca's direction as she made change and hissed,
"Sh-h-h-h-h!" right into Bianca's face.

Marianna was wearing
a thin cotton pinstriped uniform, complete with apron and cap. She
managed to brush flirtatiously against the arm of the customer who
had ordered the popcorn. She glared at Bianca. Even in this dim light
Marianna's dark eyes flashed.

Everybody was sitting
on the edge of their seats, their mouths wide open. They were
pausing, frozen in place, with their hands in their popcorn boxes,
silver candy wrappers half open, their lips halfway to their straws.
In the movie the killer was confessing his reasons for murdering the
lady, bragging how clever he'd been.

Bianca gripped the
armrests of her seat. She couldn't stand this talk of murder. If
she'd wanted to be brave and go to a movie, she should have made
certain that it was a comedy and not a murder thriller! She moaned
aloud.

Everybody went,
"Sh-h-h-h!" at Bianca — or so it seemed. They stared at her
with faces glowing in the weird light from the silver screen.

All those faces. . .
They reminded her of that day, two years ago, when the whole St.
Simons Island Police Department had been standing there in her
hospital room, looking at her just like that.

Chapter 2

Until tonight, May 27
two years ago had been the one night that Bianca could not remember.
She recalled coming home late that Friday afternoon when she'd been
only sixteen and a sophomore in high school. She'd changed out of
her gym clothes to put on jeans and a T-shirt. She was going to be
late for her babysitting job at the Shipleys.

Until tonight Bianca
hadn't been able to recall walking up to the Shipleys' front
door. The next thing she'd remembered, after changing out of her
gym clothes in her own bedroom, was sitting in the middle of a
hospital bed with bars on the sides that went up and down.

She'd been propped
up by pillows, a white sheet pulled up to her waist. Nurses had been
rushing in and out to take her temperature and her pulse. She'd
been wearing a hospital gown that tied in the back and gapped open
the rest of the way.

Where had her gym
clothes gone? Her T-shirt? Her jeans?

It had looked like
the next morning with light filtering through the window. Her parents
and Mr. and Mrs. Shipley had been sitting by her side. The Shipleys
had been holding their baby daughter, Little Katie, who'd been
noisily sucking on her bottle.

"How are you
feeling?" Mrs. Shipley had asked, beaming at Bianca. Her smile had
seemed nervous, exaggerated. "That nasty sedative that the doctors
gave you last night has finally worn off!"

Bianca had been so
dumbfounded that she hadn't been able to speak. Was she dreaming?

Mr. Shipley had
rushed up and placed a strawberry soda with whipped cream and a
maraschino cherry on the tray beside Bianca's bed.

"Feeling hungry?"
he had asked. "If you want a six-course dinner delivered from the
Cloister Hotel on a silver platter, it's yours."

"Yes!" Mrs.
Shipley had looked serious. "Name anything you want. It's yours."
Then she'd broken down crying. She'd hugged Bianca fiercely and
kissed her on the forehead. "Nothing's too good for you, honey.
Nothing!"

Bianca had stared
with an open mouth at everybody.

The florist had raced
into Bianca's private room and had thrust into her face the
biggest, prettiest bouquet of flowers — mixed carnations, roses,
daisies and pussy willow. The card had said: As a reward for saving
our daughter's life, we're setting up a trust fund in the name of
Bianca Winters, for the amount of one million dollars, to be drawn
upon by the time she is eighteen.

Bianca's parents
had broken down weeping. They'd hugged the Shipleys. They'd
hugged Little Katie. Everyone had hugged everyone else.

Mrs. Winters had
protested. "Bianca was only doing what any babysitter would do. You
don't have to give her money as a reward!"

Mrs. Shipley had
slipped her arm around Bianca's shoulders. "Bianca saved Little
Katie's life! If it weren't for your brave daughter, I would have
been holding a funeral. My daughter's life is worth any amount of
money."

"But — but I didn't
do anything for Little Katie! I never made it to your house!"
Bianca had burst out. "I was in my house thinking I was going to be
late. I must have fallen asleep. Did I fall down the stairs? What am
I doing here?" Bianca had looked around.

She hadn't felt any
soreness or stiffness in her arms and legs as she sat there in the
hospital bed. She would feel something if she'd fallen down the
stairs and broken a bone. She'd sprained her ankle once when she'd
been in grade school. That had felt mean — real, real mean.

Her mother had
sobbed, "Honey, don't you remember anything at all?" She had
covered her face with her hands. Her father had looked at Bianca
sadly and patted her mother on the back.

Only then had Bianca
noticed the entire police department from St. Simons Island standing
in the back of the room. They had slowly approached the bed until she
had been surrounded.

"Miss Winters,"
the police chief had addressed her, "you deserve a police medal,
maybe a Presidential Medal of Honor for bravery, for what you did
last night. You not only saved this little baby's life, you
grappled with a bloody murderer and didn't run away. You are the
sole surviving witness — besides Little Katie who's much too
young to remember anything — to one of the most brutal slayings
this island has ever known."

"You've got the
wrong person!" Bianca had felt protest surge through her body as
she had shrunk back in her bed. "I — I wasn't there. I — I
didn't see anything. I'm not brave."

"Shock and denial
is a common reaction," Doc had announced in a supremely confident
tone from another corner of the hospital room.

"Doc" Ernie
McCollough lived in the same subdivision Bianca did, Churchyard Oaks.
It was next to the Christ's Church Graveyard, overhung with live
oaks dripping with Spanish moss. He lived on the other side of the
street, the richer side, beside the Shipleys.

He'd been the
senior class valedictorian when he graduated two years early from
high school, at sixteen. He had been one of the most brilliant
students ever, with perfect SAT scores and a National Merit Finalist
ranking. He'd had a complete academic scholarship to attend
Northern Florida University in Jacksonville, from which he had
graduated in only three years at age nineteen.

Though his father was
a history professor and his mother was descended from one of the
island's oldest families, though no one in his family had gone into
the profession before, Doc had decided to attend medical school. He
had been in his third year that day, assigned to her ward at
Brunswick Memorial Hospital. He'd taken an interest in Bianca's
case from the beginning.

"Your brain denies
something too horrible to remember. It's a way of protecting
yourself," Doc had explained to Bianca.

He was a short guy,
not much taller than Bianca. He looked younger than his age,
twenty-two. He had a big presence with those thick, horn-rimmed
glasses. His dark brown hair was cut straight around his head as if a
bowl had been placed over it.

"We can prove you
were there, Miss Winters," the police chief had asserted. "We've
got tissue, hair, fingerprint and fiber evidence of you all over the
house. We could write the script and say first you did this and then
you did that. We can number the locations where you were in the
house, from the time you were watching the TV to the time you went up
the stairs, grabbed Little Katie from her crib, met the murderer on
the stairs, stumbled over Mrs. Ingersoll's body, and ran screaming
down the street."

Bianca had gaped at
the police in wonderment.

"What we can't
write into the script is the identity of the killer. He was clever
enough not to leave any hair or fiber evidence. He must have been
wearing gloves. There were no fingerprints. We have no way of tracing
him unless you can remember him — what he was wearing, what he
looked like, his voice. Something!"

"Honey," her
mother had gripped Bianca's hand as if her life had depended upon
it, and asked again, "can't you remember anything!"

"I tell you it
wasn't me. It wasn't!" Bianca hadn't wanted to be a hero.

"It's no use
trying to force Bianca." Doc had paced about the room as he
lectured them. "She'll remember in her own good time, or she
won't remember at all. The sole witness to a murder often takes the
identity of the killer to the grave. Or she might remember in fifty
years. She may put on a dress someday. Voila! The killer was wearing
clothing of the same color. Or she'll be stirring a stew ten years
from now. She'll suddenly see the killer's face in the stew. The
aroma of the stew will remind her that it's the same thing that she
was cooking on the night of the murder. The human brain's a strange
thing. We have to respect it and play by its rules. It won't play
by ours."

"We'll have to
ask the grown-ups then," the police chief had said. "What exactly
do any of you remember?"

"Mr. and Mrs.
Shipley were driving up the street coming back from a dinner dance at
the Cloister Hotel last night. They said they heard somebody
screaming, racing down the road toward them," Mrs. Winters had
volunteered.

"We almost ran into
Bianca," Mr. Shipley had recalled.

"I told my husband
to hit the brakes. I had a strange feeling," Mrs. Shipley had
added. "When I saw it was Bianca holding my baby, I almost fainted
— especially when I saw she had blood on her shoes and jeans."

"We pulled her into
the car with us and tried to get her to talk some sense," Mr.
Shipley had continued. "All she did was cry for help as if she were
on automatic pilot."

"We'd gone to bed
hours before," Bianca's father had volunteered. "We heard
shouting. We looked out the window, saw the Shipleys' Bentley, and
remembered our daughter was babysitting there. We raced outside in
our nightclothes."

"Bianca wouldn't
let go of Little Katie," Mrs. Shipley had wept. "She had the
child clutched to her breast and wouldn't let anybody come near —
not even me."

"We could see that
Little Katie was OK. Just scared," Mr. Shipley had added. "A
squad car pulled up alongside us and asked if anything was wrong."

"The officer peered
into the car and observed Bianca's condition. He also noticed all
the blood," Bianca's mother added. "Then he asked where Bianca
had just come from."

Mrs. Shipley had
volunteered, "I told him she'd been babysitting at our house. You
police know the story after that, after Bianca's parents leaped
inside our car, too. We followed the police. The squad car stopped in
front of our house. The lights were out. The front door was wide
open."

Mr. Shipley had
winced. "They brought the dead maid out on a stretcher. The
expression frozen on her face was one of total disbelief." He had
shaken his head.

"We want to thank
you for escorting us to the hospital when we were in shock," Mrs.
Shipley had added. "We might not have made it otherwise."

The police chief had
nodded. "The nurses recorded that both Little Katie and Bianca
checked in covered with blood. The baby had to be bathed. Bianca had
to be washed and sedated. She was hysterical."

"You're imagining
this. None of this happened." Bianca had shaken her head. "It's
impossible!"

Doc had turned out
the lights.

It had been as if
someone had stuck a knife into Bianca's breast. A horrible pain had
surged through her body, making her tremble. She had broken out into
a cold sweat in the hospital bed. Her breath had come in gasps. Her
head had swirled around. She had been overcome by white hot panic.