The Wish (Nightmare Hall) (11 page)

And she knew then, that it was
him
.

He
had
seen her standing in Amber’s window the night he tried to kill Kyle.

He knew who she was.

And he had come for her.

T
HE YELLOW BUS CONTINUED
to race over the dirt road through the woods, twisting, turning, never slowing down, its headlights splitting the darkness before it.

Gripping the edge of a seat so hard her knuckles turned white and her arms began to ache fiercely, Alex’s eyes searched frantically for a way out. Some of the shuttles had back doors…wide ones, for wheelchair access. If this was one of those buses, she could kick those doors open….

There was no back door.

She was trapped on a racing bus with a maniac. A maniac who wanted her dead, and apparently didn’t care if he died, too.

“What are you going to do?” she screamed. “Are you going to kill us both?” Was that what he had in mind? Because if the bus crashed at this speed, he would certainly die, too.

But
I
don’t want to die, Alex thought clearly.

And then, in the next moment, she heard the siren. At first she thought she was imagining it, wishing it. But her head whipped around and there it was, a big, beautiful, wonderful police car, its round blue light whirling on the roof.

She almost cried from sheer joy. She wasn’t going to
die
! The police were here. They would save her. That was their job. They wouldn’t let a perfectly innocent person die at the hands of a maniac.

Alex had no idea what to do. Staying put seemed the best idea, until the policemen caught up with them.

She hung on.

The bus whipped around a sharp curve, and she fell, slamming her head against the side of a seat. Dizziness overwhelmed her, her hands released their grip, and she sank to the floor, landing on her back. Without something to hold onto, she was tossed back and forth, her back and shoulders slamming repeatedly into the base of one seat or another. It hurt, and she cried out in pain.

Had to get up…had to…she was helpless like this…

Gritting her teeth, she reached up and fastened one hand around the curved metal handle of a seat back, and began slowly pulling herself upward again.

When she was in a sitting position, her eyes went to the front of the bus. There was movement there. She watched, disbelieving, as the dirty tan raincoat threw itself off the seat and rolled itself up into a ball, the floppy old rain hat covering any features.

Alex stared, wide-eyed.

The ball of raincoat tumbled, end over end, down the steps.

And as it tumbled, Alex heard the evil sound from her nightmare: the low, wicked
hahahahaha
….

The doors opened.

The bundle of raincoat dove through the opening.

The doors closed.

Alex heard the sinister laughter for several moments after the doors closed.

Frozen in shock, it took her several minutes to understand what had happened. When she did, she nearly fainted with terror.

There was no one at the wheel!

E
VERYTHING BECAME A BLUR
after that.

Alex had never learned to drive.

Crying and shaking, she managed to pull herself to her feet and make her way up the aisle. When she slid into the driver’s seat, she did it in a state of shock and had no memory of it afterward. Later, the policemen told her that she did a great job of steering the bus, keeping it from careening off the road, until, no longer being fed gas, it finally slowed and, gradually, bumped to a stop against an embankment.

But she remembered none of that. The last thing she remembered was that evil, blood-chilling
hahahahahah
as the raincoat went out the door of the bus. The sound still rang in her ears.

They told her they had a hard time getting her fingers to uncurl from around the steering wheel. She didn’t remember ever touching the steering wheel.

When she was sitting safely in the police car, she asked tremulously, “Did you catch him? He went into the woods, I think.”

“No, miss,” the driver said. “I let my partner here out of the car when we saw the guy jump, and he followed on foot for some distance, but the guy must have been moving pretty fast. No sign of him. Disappeared into thin air, seems like.”

“I can’t believe he wasn’t killed when he jumped,” Alex said. “The bus was going so fast. How could anyone survive that?”

“Don’t know, Miss. But he did. And in good health, I’d guess, or he wouldn’t have eluded Ryan here. Could be hiding somewhere around here. We’ll take you home and then organize a search. We’ll find him, don’t you worry.”

Right. What on earth did she have to worry about? She was safe in a police car, wasn’t she? If only she could stay there forever. “How did you know we were out here, in the middle of nowhere?” she asked.

“Some concerned citizen with a car phone called in and said there was a maniac on the highway doing figure eights with a university shuttle bus. He saw you take that detour onto Old Sawmill Road. You sure you’re okay?”

To Alex’s complete astonishment, she really was okay. No blood, nothing broken, and most important of all,
alive
. She was alive.

The other surprising thing was that it took the policemen only a few minutes to drive her back to her dorm.

“We were this close to school?” she asked incredulously. “Right around the corner from it?”

The policeman opening the door for her nodded. “Yep. Your driver made a couple of U-turns. You were actually just behind one of the off-campus dorms—Nightingale Hall.”

Alex shuddered. It figured that was where her own nightmare had taken place.

They sat in the empty lobby at Lester, where the policemen asked her endless questions. Alex had never felt so stupid. She had been warned against going anywhere alone. Not only had she left the party alone, she’d climbed aboard a bus empty of other passengers. But it had never occurred to her to be wary of a bus driver.

The officers stood up. “If we don’t find the guy when we search the woods, we’ll talk to the captain about putting a guard on you,” one of them said.

But when they’d walked her to her room and left, Alex cringed at the idea of some police officer following her around all over campus all day long. People would stare at her. She would hate that.

They’d probably catch the guy. He must have hurt
something
when he dove off that speeding bus. He was probably holed up in the woods somewhere, nursing his wounds, and they’d catch him before he could get away.

Then she’d be safe again.

She locked the door before crawling underneath the covers to wait, wide awake, for Jenny to come home. Periodically, she would begin shaking violently and would have to bite down on her lower lip, hard, to calm down.

Jenny came home in a bad mood.

“They all went off somewhere without me!” she cried, tossing her purse on the bed. “Marty, Bennett, Gabe…I couldn’t believe it! I had to walk back with Jill and Amber.”

Alex, who would cheerfully have settled for a nice, safe walk home instead of an insane bus ride, sat up. “Where did they go? The guys, I mean?”

Jenny flopped down on her bed and leaned against the wall. “Gabe said his legs were bothering him and he wanted to call Julie, so he left. And then Marty found out you were gone, so he left, too.”

Alex didn’t see why. It wasn’t as if he’d been clinging to her like a vine at the party.

“And then Bennett left. Said he needed his rest for the ‘big game’ tomorrow. I got mad. I mean, we’d been having so much fun, I didn’t want him to leave. A little while later, I was sorry I’d lost my temper, and called him to apologize. He wasn’t there.”

“Maybe he was asleep. Like he said, big game tomorrow.”

Jenny shook her head. “I’ll bet anything he went down to Vinnie’s. He’s been spending so much time there lately. He’s obsessed with that stupid fortune-teller.”

Alex felt a chill. “The Wizard?”

“Yeah. Everyone else is pretty bored with it by now, but not Bennett. And,” Jenny pulled her hair loose from its ponytail and let it fall around her shoulders, “I saw Marty and Gabe hanging around it a couple of times this week, too.” She shrugged. “I don’t get what they see in it myself. I thought it would be fun, too, at first. But the cards are so stupid. They don’t mean a thing.”

True…unless you witness an attempted murder and The Wizard gives you a card that says SILENCE IS GOLDEN, Alex thought.
That
could certainly mean something.

But then, Alex reminded herself, Marty had received the same card. Jenny was right. The cards didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t as if she’d received a card that said BEWARE OF YELLOW BUSES.
That
would have meant something.

“How was Julie?” Jenny asked suddenly.

And Alex remembered that she had been on her way to the hospital when she’d been…hijacked. Could she tell Jenny what had happened? She wanted to tell
someone
. Maybe saying it out loud would make it seem, somehow, not so terrible.

But telling Jenny might be putting her in danger, too. If the police didn’t catch the guy tonight or tomorrow…horrible thought…he would still be on the loose. And he might guess that she had told her roommate. No, Jenny mustn’t know. For her own sake.

“I never got there. I decided I was too tired, so I just came home.” The lie came more easily than she’d thought it would. Maybe because it was for a good reason.

As she rolled over and tried to go to sleep, a sound echoed in her head…a deep, evil
hahahahahaha
.

A
LEX AWOKE IN THE
morning exhausted.

She had to fight the urge to stay in bed, under the covers all day. But she refused to hide in her room for the rest of her life. Besides, it was beautiful outside, clear and crisp, with a bright blue, cloudless sky. Another perfect football day. At the stadium, surrounded by classmates and friends, Alex tried to shed the terror of her crazy bus ride. If only the phone had rung before she and Jenny left their room, if only the police had called with good news….

Was he still out there somewhere?

Not only did Marty receive a few minutes of playing time in the game, but to Alex’s surprise, so did Gabe and Bennett. Bennett was brilliant, throwing a tricky pass that earned a last-minute touchdown.

“I can’t believe Coach let Gabe play,” Alex told Jenny as they waited outside the stadium for the boys. They were all going to Vinnie’s for pizza.

“Why not? He let Bennett play, and Bennett’s been on crutches, too. Gabe got his stitches out Wednesday, Julie told me. And he probably wore lots of padding today. Anyway, it was only for a few minutes, Alex. I heard Coach telling Prof Pagnozi that we’re going to have a super team next year. Championship caliber, he said.” Her expression grew dreamy. “And I know he meant because of Bennett. Wasn’t he great today?” She sighed. “I’ve never gone out with a football star before. Julie dated all the star athletes in high school. But not me. I always wanted to.”

Gabe and Bennett both insisted they were fine, when Alex asked. And she noticed that neither one of them was limping. Playing for those few minutes didn’t seem to have done any further damage.

At Vinnie’s, Alex was relieved to find that no one had heard any rumors about a wild bus ride on a dirt road behind the school. If they had, they would have been gossiping about it. They might have asked questions. And she wouldn’t have had any answers.

But she was disappointed, when she called the police station from Vinnie’s pay phone, to learn that the hijacker hadn’t been caught, yet.

She couldn’t believe it. How far could he have gone? He
must
have hurt himself when he dove off that bus. How could he
not
have?

Crestfallen, she replaced the receiver on the wall phone. When she turned around, she was staring straight into the eyes of The Wizard.

“You’re supposed to know so much,” she demanded, “why don’t
you
tell me what’s going on?”

And then, before she could move away, the arm clanked and whirred and lifted, and when she looked, there was a card in the little cup on the outside of the booth.

“But I didn’t put a quarter in,” she protested even as curiosity moved her to reach out and take the card. “Business is so bad, you’re giving them away free now?”

Marty suddenly appeared around the corner. His face was badly bruised from an encounter with the opposing team’s tackle, and he was walking very stiffly. “You here again?” he teased, apparently forgetting that he’d been annoyed with her for leaving the party the night before. “Can’t stay away from this guy, can you? Should I be jealous?”

“I thought it was
you
who couldn’t stay away,” she said coolly. “You and Bennett and Gabe. Jenny said you guys hang around this thing a lot. I wanted to see if I was missing something about Old Stoneface here, so I decided to give him a shot.” She didn’t tell Marty that she hadn’t deposited a coin.

“So, what’s the card say?” he asked.

Alex looked down at the card. And her mouth fell open. “I…I…” She had been prepared to shrug and say the card didn’t mean anything. That was what she had planned to do. Expected to do.

But she couldn’t.

Because what the card said was, THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND.

“Hey, I know that song!” Marty said when he’d read the card. “We used to sing it on the way to summer camp.” He began singing. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…”

“Shut up!” Alex snapped.

“What? What’s wrong? You look sick. It’s just a kids’ song, right?”

Alex looked up, directly into the eyes of The Wizard. Wasn’t he…smiling? Weren’t his red-painted lips curved up, just a little?

She was losing her mind. Who could blame her, after the week she’d had?

“It is kind of weird, though,” Marty said. “I mean, a kids’ song? That’s not anything like all the other cards we got.”

She didn’t want to talk about it. She couldn’t. “C’mon, I’m starving,” she urged, tugging at Marty’s hand. She had to get away from those cruel blue eyes.