The Wish (Nightmare Hall) (8 page)

“He’s not dead,” Marty said quickly. He looked up, glancing around the crowd, and repeated, “He’s not dead.” Bennett and Gabe, who were close by, nodded. Jenny and Kiki, their faces a sickly yellow in the tower lights, stood next to them, crying, their hands over their mouths.

“Did he jump?” a voice in the crowd asked.

“No!” Alex cried, furious. “He didn’t!” She would have added then, “He was thrown over the side.” But even as someone said casually, “Well, people
have
jumped from there, you know,” sirens screamed, and Alex got to her feet. There was something she had to do.

Without a word to anyone, she turned and pushed back through the crowd, ignoring Marty’s shocked, “Alex? Where—?”

She ran to the tower entrance, praying it wouldn’t be locked.

It wasn’t. Yanking the heavy door open, she went inside and ran straight to the stairs. No time to wait for the elevator to the sixth floor. If the police came with the ambulance, as they probably would, they wouldn’t let anyone into the tower until they’d checked it out. They wouldn’t let her up there. And she had to see the place Kyle had fallen from, see it for herself, see if there was anything to tell her who had done this terrible thing.

The tower was deserted. It was late. The staircase was dimly lit, by only one small light at the top of each flight of stairs. Hardly enough to see by. It was cold in the stairwell, and silent. Her footsteps echoed so loudly on the stone steps, she was sure the people outside would hear and come to see what she was up to.

Third floor…fourth floor…out of breath…keep going…have to see if Kyle’s attacker left anything, anything at all…

Fifth floor, one more flight…ah! the door to the sixth floor.

She hesitated. He wouldn’t still be around, would he…Kyle’s attacker?

No. He would have left the moment he saw the crowd gathering. No one who had done what he’d done would hang around, waiting to be caught.

Alex hurried on.

So dark…no one around. Security guards? Where would they be? If they found her, they’d stop her. Maybe they’d even think she was somehow involved.

But they’d probably heard Kyle’s screams and had rushed outside. They’d be out there now, wanting to help.

Could anyone help Kyle now? There was…so much blood under his head and he lay there so quietly, so quietly….

Alex ran down the hall, searching for the entrance to the observation deck on the side facing Lester. Offices, offices, all empty now, all dark. The clickety-clack of her boot heels on the polished wood floor hurt her ears. She smelled cleaning fluid…where was the cleaning staff? On another floor?

Here! Here was the door she wanted. She pulled it open cautiously, in case she’d been wrong about Kyle’s attacker leaving, and was immediately assaulted by a gust of wind ripping at her face and hair.

But it died quickly, unlike the vicious evening wind up on the eighteenth floor.

There was no one on the deck. Nothing but a few tall potted plants.

Alex tried to think, to concentrate, as the heavy door slammed shut behind her. Where had the two figures been standing? She couldn’t remember. Think, think, think….

She ran to the edge of the wall and cautiously peered down. The crowd looked like miniature people, so far below her. A circling blue light on top of one vehicle below her, a similar light, this one red, on a larger vehicle. Police and ambulance. The police would be in the tower at any moment.

She turned to face the deck, and felt sick again. Why would someone throw sweet Kyle to his death? Kyle had never hurt anyone. He couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. On the football field, maybe, but nowhere else.

And it
was
death that Kyle’s attacker had intended. No question about that. You didn’t toss a person from a sixth story and expect him to get up and walk away with a few harmless bruises and maybe a scrape or two.

Conscious of each passing minute, Alex scoured every inch of the stone deck, aided only by yellow lights on the deck roof.

Nothing. She found nothing.

Remembering what she had witnessed, replaying it in her mind, she tried to follow every step that Kyle and his enemy had taken.

Still finding nothing, she stopped and leaned against the wall, beside a tall potted plant, its fernlike branches swaying in the wind. One soft, delicate branch brushed against her cheek. She slapped it away impatiently.

A departing siren’s wail told her time was running out. Kyle was on his way to the hospital. The police would be on their way up here. They’d make her leave the deck, and she hadn’t found a thing that would help identify the person who had hurt Kyle.

The feathery branch tickled her cheek again. Frustrated by her disappointing search, she swatted at the greenery so hard the stem broke and fell into the base with a faint whooshing sound.

Alex’s eyes guiltily followed its descent. And saw, at the base of the plant, something gleaming in the weak yellow lights. Something small…and golden.

She reached down and picked it up.

A tiny, gold football, with a small golden hoop in the center so that it could be worn on a chain.

Alex stared at the tiny charm, rolling it in the palm of her hand. How long had it been hiding in the pot? It wasn’t dirty. Couldn’t have been in there very long.

Of course, anyone could have dropped it. Anyone. At any time. Not necessarily on this particular Saturday night.

Or…Kyle himself could have lost it, when he was racing back and forth on the deck, trying to find a way out.

Imagining how frightened he must have been, Alex closed her eyes in pain. He must have known something terrible was about to happen to him, or he wouldn’t have been moving so frantically. But he couldn’t possibly have imagined
how
terrible, could he?

Just then, a security guard arrived, followed by two Twin Falls policemen in uniform. They immediately demanded to know what she was doing on the deck.

She told them. She told them everything she’d seen. Then she gave them the football charm, telling them where she’d found it. One of the policemen took it from her and dropped it into a plastic bag he took from his pocket.

“It wasn’t an accident?” he said. “You actually saw someone throw the victim off this deck? Are you sure? Where were you at the time?”

“I’m positive.” Alex pointed to Lester. “I was over there. At a party. In that room with all the lights on.” She could see people moving around in Amber’s room. The light over there was much brighter than the deck lighting.

“Anyone know you saw this?” the policeman asked her in a casual voice.

“Oh, sure,” Alex said, thinking at first that he wanted to corroborate her story. “Everyone who was at the party knows I saw it happen.”

“Hmm. Might want to tell them to keep it to themselves,” he said in that same casual tone, and his partner nodded emphatically.

And then Alex got it. Her stomach rose up to meet her throat. Oh, God, she’d been a witness to a crime, and everyone at the party knew it! They’d tell other people, and those people would tell more people, and soon everyone on campus would know that she’d seen what happened to Kyle. Including…

Including the person who had committed the crime.

“Which window, exactly, was it?” the policeman asked her. “Where you were standing, I mean. Can you point it out?”

“Yes. The party’s still going on.” Amber’s guests hadn’t been as rattled by Kyle’s tragedy as Alex had. She led the two policemen to the edge of the deck and pointed out the window. As they watched, a girl came to the window and looked down upon the Commons, perhaps checking to see if things had returned to normal.

Alex could see her clearly. Long, blonde hair, a green shirt…it was Amber. And if
Amber
was identifiable from the sixth floor deck…

Alex gasped in horror.

I
T WAS A STRICKEN
Alex who finally breathed in disbelief, “But I can see Amber from here! I can even tell what color her hair is!” She turned toward the officers. “I couldn’t see who was over
here
. It never occurred to me that anyone could have seen me!”

“Lighting’s better over there,” the older policeman said.

Alex took a shaky step backward. “But…but that means…that means he saw me
watching
! And,” she ran a hand through her shoulder-length dark hair, “I’ve got this white streak in my hair, I’ve had it forever, no one else on campus has it, if he could see
that
, he…he…”

“You don’t know that he saw you at all,” the policeman said. “The way you told it, his attention was pretty much focused on the victim. He’d have had to turn and look sideways, at that building, to see you standing there. Did you see him do that at any time?”

Alex thought for a minute. No, she didn’t think he had turned. Wouldn’t she remember if he had turned and looked at her? The thought gave her chills.

“We’ll check out the party guests,” she was told, “tell them mum’s the word about what you saw. And you keep it to yourself, understand? Until we know more, I would suggest you tell no one.
No one
.”

Alex nodded silently.

The policemen walked her back to her dorm. On the sixth floor, she pointed out Amber’s room, and they left in search of party guests.

But first, they told her to lock her door.

She locked it with shaking hands.

There was a note from Jenny on the bathroom mirror. She had gone to the hospital, with Marty, Bennett, Gabe, and Kiki, to find out how Kyle was.

Alex went to the phone.

The nurse who answered would tell her only, “Mr. Leavitt is resting comfortably.”

Resting comfortably? What did that mean?

Well, it meant Kyle wasn’t dead. That was enough for now.

She was too tired to wait up for Jenny. Sleep…she needed sleep…

She fell into bed with her clothes on, and was asleep in minutes.

But she did not rest comfortably. Her subconscious served up a smorgasbord of horrifying images that caused Alex to thrash and moan all night long. First she saw Julie, from the back: thick, short hair shining like gold, free of bandages. Then she turned around…and she had no face. There was only an empty oval where her features should have been. It was like looking into a mirror with no glass, and Alex, in sleep, saw again the grotesque mirror the twins had wrestled over in the hospital. In her dream, she began hunting for the ugly thing, searching the hospital room, looking in the closet and in the bathroom. There was no sign of it, and no clue about where it had come from.

Then the nightmare scene changed and she was standing in the doorway of another room, a small, cold, white cubicle, with only a white table inside. A figure lay on the table, covered to its neck with a heavy black cloth. Alex didn’t want to go inside. But she was pulled in by a force stronger than herself. Closer, closer…music came from somewhere, slow and haunting, like a funeral dirge. She clapped her hands over her ears, but her legs kept moving closer and closer to the black-draped table. She could

See the chin, the nose…Kyle! Lying like stone, unmoving, unblinking, his eyes wide open, staring up at her. His skin was gray and looked as cold and smooth as marble.

Then his lips moved, and as she gasped and jumped backward, he said in a hoarse voice,
“Peace and quiet, peace and quiet, I have peace and quiet, Alex.”

Kyle’s image was replaced by Gabe’s. He was rolling down the hospital corridor on a wheeled cart that sat low to the ground, like a child’s go-cart. He had no legs. “Look, Alex,” he cried happily, grinning up at her, “I’ve finally got wheels!” As she stared at him, he raced down the hall and around a corner and disappeared.

And then the face of The Wizard was gazing down at her, his blue eyes glinting, his mouth open beneath the white beard and mustache, and he threw his head back and laughed, hahahahahahaha, like the ugly pink woman Alex had hated at the amusement park.
Hahahahah
…

Alex jerked awake, moaning, covered in a cold sweat.

The phone rang.

It was one of the policemen. “I’ve done some checking about that football charm you found. They were given to all the freshmen when they made the football team this year. They come with a gold chain. But most of the guys probably put them away somewhere, with their high school class ring.”

Freshman football players? There were several freshmen on the team, including Marty, Gabe, and Bennett…Shivering, Alex offered, “I could ask around, see who made a practice of wearing theirs or carrying it around with them.”

“No!” he said sharply, surprising her. “Don’t talk to anyone about this. Let us handle it. And, Miss, I wouldn’t go anywhere alone. Keep friends with you or your boyfriend…”

She didn’t tell him she didn’t have a boyfriend.

When Alex hung up, a wave of uneasiness washed over her. Did she really need to keep someone with her at all times, at least until they caught the person who had attacked Kyle? They didn’t even know if he had seen her.

He didn’t, she told herself as she put on her bathrobe. I know he didn’t. I would have seen him looking at me. Wouldn’t I?

But she’d been upset, watching. Hadn’t she closed her eyes when Kyle fell? He might have looked over at her then.

Maybe?
she asked herself cynically as she thrust her telltale white streak of hair up under a green felt hat. Don’t you mean probably, almost certainly, what-are-the-chances-that-he-didn’t? Isn’t
that
what you mean?

Jenny came out of the shower, her hair, un-toweled, dripping on the shoulders of her green robe. “You okay?” she asked Alex. “You didn’t sleep very well last night. You were fighting with your sheets and making all these weird noises.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I didn’t get in until late, anyway.” Jenny moved to the closet to pick out something to wear. “After Bennett and I found out that Kyle wasn’t going to wake up at all last night, we went for a drive. We were both pretty upset, and it was a nice night out.”

Bennett and I? They were “Bennett and I” now?

“Awful what happened to Kyle, isn’t it?” Jenny went on, her voice muted as she rummaged in the depths of the closet. “You don’t think he jumped, do you?”