Captives (Nightmare Hall) (7 page)

“That cut on the side of her head looks nasty,” Daisy said. “Maybe we should try to clean it up. That might do her some good. I’ll run downstairs and get a wet washcloth.”

“Daisy!” Toni shrieked, clutching the elbow of Daisy’s wine velvet dress. “You are not going down there alone! No one is. There’s someone
in this house!
Someone who did that,” pointing with a shaking finger at Lynne.

“We don’t
know
that he’s in here. He could be gone by now,” Daisy said, without much conviction. “In fact,” her voice gathering strength, “I’ll bet anything he’s gone. Here’s what probably happened. He was hiding in the house for some reason—maybe he’s a homeless person and picked this place to get in out of the rain, just like we did. When we showed up, he decided to leave. Only when he went outside, Lynne surprised him by being at the woodbox. He panicked and hit her. Then he got scared, and decided to hide her so he’d have time to get away. Then he left.” She finished on a note of satisfaction.

Toni, anxious to believe her, asked, “You really don’t think he’s still here?”

“Nope. There was plenty of time for him to split
before
we locked the doors. Now they’re locked, so he can’t get back in even if he changes his mind.”

“The back door into the kitchen isn’t locked,” Toni reminded her. “We didn’t have the key, remember? All we could do was put the chain on.” She drew in her breath, almost whispering, “Maybe
he
has the key. Maybe he can come and go as he pleases.”

And that was when they all realized that the loose shutter had stopped banging against the house.

Toni said it first. “The hammering … it’s stopped.”

They listened.

“But the storm hasn’t,” Daisy said uneasily, “so why isn’t that shutter still making a racket? I mean, if it was loose before, it’s still loose, right? So why isn’t it still slamming away out there?”

They listened more intently.

There was no hammering sound.

“Maybe,” Toni said then, leaning against an upright trunk for support because the thought she was about to give voice to made her legs weak, “maybe that hammering wasn’t a loose shutter. Maybe it wasn’t even coming from outside.” The hand holding the flashlight dropped as if it could no longer carry the weight, and her words came out slowly, reluctantly. “Maybe … it … was … coming … from … inside.” She stared at Molloy and Daisy. “What if he’s been in here all along?”

“He
hasn’t,”
Daisy said, clearly struggling to convince herself as well as them. “He can’t be. After he attacked Lynne, he’d get as far away from here as possible. Probably ran like the wind. It
was
a shutter we heard, and it’s just stopped banging, that’s all. He’s not still here, so just don’t say that.”

“Whether he’s here or not,” Molloy said grimly, tucking the edges of the bedspread carefully under Lynne’s chin, “we have to figure out what to do. The phones are dead. Lynne needs an ambulance, but we can’t call one, and we can’t call the police, either. We can’t go outside because we don’t want to end up like Lynne. And we can’t start a fire in the fireplace so that someone will see the smoke and come running because we don’t have any wood.”

“Well, we can’t stay up here all night, either,” Daisy said. “I don’t care what we do as long as we do something.” She glanced down at the trunk. “We don’t know how long Lynne can wait, either.”

“We can’t just
leave
her up here,” Toni protested. “And we can’t move her. Someone has to stay up here with her until help comes.”

A heavy silence filled the attic. Daisy and Molloy knew Toni was right. But sitting up here with their wounded friend, necessary though it might be, wasn’t going to get them away from Nightmare Hall, and it wasn’t going to get them any help, either.

“I’ll stay with her,” Toni said suddenly, astonishing the other two girls. “You go ahead. Figure out what to do and do it, and I’ll stay up here with Lynne.”

“You?” Daisy gasped tactlessly.

“Daisy, I know you think of me as a whining, wimpy musician, but I think I can handle sitting with Lynne. And before you hand me any medals for bravery, I have to tell the truth. I feel safer up here, in this one room at the top of the house, than I would downstairs with all of those other rooms for someone to be hiding in.”

“He’s
not
still here,” Daisy denied vehemently. “He’s not!” But her voice trembled.

“You won’t leave me in the house alone, though, right?” Toni said anxiously. “I mean, you won’t suddenly decide to both go for help, will you? One of you will stay here and let me know what’s going on?”

“We would never do that, Toni,” Molloy said. “And before we put you on guard duty, we’ll go down and get Arturo for you. Where’d you leave him?”

“I had him with me until we started up the attic stairs. He’s right down there in the hall. That’d be great.”

Toni grabbed at the violin case when they brought it to her as if it held all the answers. Clutching it, she huddled on the floor beside the trunk. “It’s awfully stuffy in here,” she complained. “I need air, and Lynne probably does, too. I’ll open a window.”

“Okay,” Daisy said, “we’ll be back up as soon as we figure out how to get out of this mess.”

Toni insisted they take the flashlight. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” she said. “And you’ve got the whole house to deal with. I know where everything is up here, and if I bump into a box or two, it won’t … hurt me.”

Daisy and Molloy knew she had started to say, “It won’t kill me.”

Daisy took an extra precious few minutes to take off the damp velvet dress and throw on an old blue coat she found hanging on a peg rack against one wall. Then, with one last check on Lynne, who was still breathing but hadn’t moved at all, Daisy and Molloy left the attic.

On the third floor, Daisy said quietly, “I can’t believe someone carried Lynne into the house and all the way up to the attic without us knowing about it. How is that possible?”

Molloy shrugged. She kept the flashlight aimed in front of them as they cautiously made their way down the stairs. “There has to be another staircase. A lot of old houses have back stairs. We should look for it. But first we have to figure out how to get help. That’s the first thing. I’m worried sick about Lynne. Her pulse was so weak.”

“She’s not going to die, is she?” Tough, streetwise Daisy’s voice was quavering.

“We won’t let her.” But Molloy sounded far braver than she felt. She hadn’t bought one word of Daisy’s scenario about Lynne’s attacker leaving the house. She wanted to believe it, more than she’d ever wanted to believe anything. But she couldn’t. That hammering
had
come from inside the house, she was sure of it. It would have been fainter if it had come from outside, with the sound battling against the noise of the storm. This sound had been sharper, more distinct.

When they began moving down the main stairs to the second floor, they stopped talking, staying very close together. Molloy was slightly in the lead, still holding the flashlight. The house seemed to her darker and colder and more threatening. But she knew it wasn’t the house itself. It was what might be
in
the house.

She knew they should be hurrying, racing downstairs to see if a telephone might be working now, or frantically trying to figure out what to do. But their steps on the stairs were small, hesitant, their eyes constantly scanning the darkness around them. And although Daisy wasn’t actually clutching the back of Molloy’s yellowed blouse, because Daisy wasn’t that kind of person, it almost felt as if she were.

We are going to
have
to separate at some point, Molloy thought in despair. One of us will have to go for help if we can’t use the phone. Lynne has to have medical attention.

The thought of running out into that stormy darkness where Lynne had been attacked, the possibility of ending up lying on the ground with her own skull cracked open, made Molloy’s heart stop.

But someone had to go for help.

As they passed each room on the third and second floors, they opened the doors and Molloy swept the rooms with the flashlight. She had no idea what they would do if someone actually jumped out from behind a piece of furniture, maybe brandishing a weapon of some kind in their faces. But checking seemed better than just walking by the rooms as if everything were perfectly normal.

They found no sign of anything unusual in any of the rooms. No wet footprints, no open windows with the curtains blowing and the rain coming in.

When they reached the entry hall, and tried the phone, it was still dead.

To their relief, the front door was still locked, with no sign of forced entry.

“He’s not in here,” Daisy whispered in Molloy’s ears as they moved cautiously along the hallway, “I know he’s not. He’s gone.”

When they had checked the library and the parlor and the dining room and found nothing, and then moved on into the kitchen and found the frying pan still fastened firmly over the broken windowpane, Molloy’s heart leaped with hope. Maybe Daisy was right. Maybe he had taken just a few minutes to come back into the house and, using a back entrance or staircase, hidden Lynne in the trunk to give himself more time to get away, and then had left by the same back entrance.

And maybe the hammering sound they’d heard really had been a shutter.

But they still had to figure out how to get help.

When they saw no sign of an intruder, Daisy said, “You said we’re close to Salem. Somebody has to hike out of this mausoleum and get a doctor for Lynnie. I’ll go.” She forced a grin. “I’m the one wearing the coat, right?”

“Daisy … he could still be out there. Waiting for us to leave so he can have his place back.”

“Oh, he’s long gone by now. Probably terrified of the cops. If he wasn’t scared of being caught, he wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to hide Lynne, He’d have left her lying there on the ground in the rain. He was buying himself some time, to get away.”

It sounded so logical, made so much sense. And Daisy sounded so much like she knew what she was talking about.

“Well, at least go out the front way. Ernie said this house was on a hill overlooking a highway. Maybe you can flag down a car right away.” Molloy hadn’t forgotten that the highway had been closed due to flooding. She remembered the detour that had begun this nightmare. But she was trying desperately to sound optimistic before Daisy started out. And there was always a chance that the highway had been opened by now, although it didn’t sound like the weather had improved much.

“Right,” Daisy agreed. “If not, I’ll hike up the highway on foot.”

Daisy marched to the door and reached out to turn the doorknob. Turned, twisted it, shook it, felt all around the doorframe for another key, found none, yanked on the doorknob again, and, finally, gave the heavy wooden door a kick and turned around in defeat. “Without a key,” she said flatly, “this door is not going to open.”

“Well, let’s look for one. Maybe there’s an extra set somewhere.”

They searched all around the doorframe and then went back into the kitchen to look. There was a key rack hanging near the back door, but it was empty.

“Well, I guess it’s the back door, then,” Daisy said, giving up on the search. “At least we know that one’s open, since we couldn’t lock it without a key.”

Molloy knew Daisy didn’t want to go out back, didn’t want to have to pass the woodbox. She didn’t blame her. But what choice did they have?

Daisy, her face pale, shrugged and went straight to the back door. Saying, “Here goes nothing!” she released the chain and turned the doorknob.

Although Daisy tugged on the door, it didn’t open.

“What’s going on?” Molloy said, moving forward to stand at Daisy’s side,

Daisy went through the same ritual she’d performed on the front door, to no avail. The door was immovable.

Without even turning around, Daisy sagged against the door and said, “It’s not going to open. It’s either locked from the outside or nailed shut.”

“Nailed shut? On the outside?”

Daisy turned around, her face red from her efforts. “That’s what it feels like. There were a lot of old, deserted buildings in my neighborhood. When the absentee owners got tired of us kids hanging around their property, they came over and nailed all of the doors and windows shut.” She added grimly as she walked to the sink to stare at the wall of windows behind it, “If someone had been
inside
those buildings when the boards went up over the doors and the nails went in,” turning again to direct a level gaze at Molloy, “they would have been trapped.”

“Trapped?” Molloy stared at Daisy. “But …”

“It’s probably not nailed shut,” Daisy said quickly. “But it sure is locked. And it wasn’t when we came back in from the woodbox. I’ll have to go out a window.” But the look on her face was not optimistic as her eyes returned to the windows.

“Check them,” Molloy urged, guessing what Daisy was thinking. “At least check them.”

Daisy hauled a wooden chair over to the sink and stood on it to examine the windows. Her shoulders slumped. She turned her head toward Molloy who was standing behind her aiming the flashlight forward. “Well,” Daisy said, her voice bleak, “now we know what all that hammering was.”

Disbelieving, Molloy rushed to join Daisy at the sink, climbed up on the chair beside her, leaned forward anxiously to see for herself.

Every window had been nailed shut.

Daisy jumped down, hurried to the door, removed the tape holding the frying pan, peered out through the hole. “It’s not barred,” she said as she taped the pan back into place. “There wasn’t time to nail a board across the door. But it
is
locked, which means someone has a key. Someone who doesn’t want us leaving,”

Then she turned around to face Molloy. Leaning against the door, her face drained of color and looking pinched, Daisy said wearily, “We can’t leave. We’re trapped in here.”

I
’M IN CHARGE NOW.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone here in this dismal place. I’m here. I’m right here, listening, even watching sometimes. Like now.

The girl with the frizzy blonde hair all wet and curly around her face looks mad. The other girl, the pretty one in the long skirt, looks like a trapped animal.