Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall) (16 page)

“Anyone who can draw a straight line can imitate life. They sit in gardens and paint the flowers as they see them, they paint faces exactly as they are, they paint buildings and bridges and animals and sunsets and seascapes, but they paint them just as they see them. What is creative about that? Nothing. I, on the other hand, paint what I see in my head and then—I create it. My paintings aren’t
imitating
life. They’re creating it.”

No, they’re not, Rachel thought, outraged. They’re creating
death.
Anyone can do that if they’re evil enough.

“You can’t imagine, with your tiny little mind,” the voice went on, “the power of such an act. So close to the act of creation itself. Of course, I had to be very, very careful. So many tiny minds out there. Wouldn’t understand. So I was careful to disguise the true meaning of the paintings. And, of course, I never signed them. Too dangerous. Actually, Rachel, I never expected anyone to see through them. Certainly not someone as uneducated in art as yourself. You really surprised me.”

He was still stirring. “You almost ruined everything. It’s a good thing no one listened to you. I love what I’m doing, and I intend to keep doing it. You can’t imagine the high I get when I’ve painted something beautiful and then made it happen. Made it
happen!
What could be more powerful than that?”

“They’re not beautiful,” Rachel said, unable to stop herself.

The stirring motion halted abruptly, and the voice, when it came, was ominous. Rachel could hear that even through the cotton balls. “What did you say?”

Rachel hesitated. She was taking a terrible chance here. She was lying on this table completely helpless and she was antagonizing him? She was as crazy as he was.

But she had wanted to distract him, hadn’t she? Maybe if she made him mad enough, he’d set the pitcher down. “Nobody likes them. That seascape was horrible. Just a lot of blobs of color. Anyone could have painted it, even a six-year-old. I threw it away.”

“You
what?
”

“Tossed it in the trash. The incinerator at Lester. Probably already burned to a crisp by now. Exactly what it deserved.”

No more stirring sounds. Rage in the voice now. “You stupid girl! I have to have those paintings! I was going to retrieve the seascape when I’d finished with you. You
can’t
have destroyed it! I must keep all of them, every single one, as testimonial to the power of my work. Someday, years from now, I will make my power public. To show them. Show them all!” The voice deepened. “You’re lying. I can tell you’re lying. You never destroyed that painting. You liked it too much. I heard you talking about it.”

There it was, finally, the slight, distant think she’d been waiting for, the sound of the pitcher being deposited on the table, so close to her right foot.

Rachel didn’t waste a second. Keeping the image in the watercolor in her mind, she threw her right foot sideways to where she thought the pitcher should be.

Her aim was accurate. She felt the pitcher as her foot slammed into it, heard the splashing sound as the pitcher went flying, imagined the plaster spraying in a white, milky arc out across the room, heard the shattering sound as the pitcher smashed into the hard, unyielding tile and exploded into a million pieces.

Heard him scream, wild with rage.

Rachel wondered how many more seconds she had to live.

H
E SCREAMED, HE SHOUTED,
he shook the table.

But he didn’t kill her.

She knew why. If he killed her now, without the mask, the image in the watercolor would mean nothing. There’d be no “high,” no heady rush of power, no swollen ego.

Furious as he was, he was willing to wait for what he wanted, needed, had to have.

And the sink was on the far side of the room, under the wide, low windows. He had to go over there to get more water if he was going to mix up a new batch of plaster.

Plaster … Rachel remembered Aidan tugging on the dumbwaiter ropes, hauling a brand-new bag of plaster upward.

She pushed the image from her mind.

All senses alert now, Rachel could hear faint mopping and wiping sounds as he cleaned up the mess on the floor. As long as the sound continued, she knew he was working on the tile, his back to her as he knelt below her table.

Free to move now, she wriggled her fingers this way and that, stretching them as far as she could in hopes of reaching the jeans pocket and the X-Acto knife. There wasn’t much time. Soon enough, he’d stand up and see her wiggling about, know she was up to something. He’d find the knife and take it from her, and she would have no hope then. None.

Desperate, she lifted her back a fraction of an inch higher to give her hands more room, and suddenly, there it was, the edge of her pocket.

There was no time to be careful. She slid the knife out, and then carefully pressed the button to release the blade.

“I don’t have much time. People are going to be looking for you,” the voice said, and Rachel could tell that he was standing up now, then moving to the sink, probably dripping a trail of wet plaster every step of the way.

How thick were the ropes that bound her? Rachel wondered.

Not very, as it turned out. He had simply wound a single strand of twine around her wrists. It took her no more than a few seconds to slice through it with the knife.

Her hands were free.

But he mustn’t know that. She wanted more than anything to reach up and pull the cotton from her eyes, to see him clearly, to know who this monster was, this maniac who killed for the sheer power of it. All in the name of art.

But a look wasn’t worth giving away her newfound freedom. She needed to catch him by surprise.

Rachel could barely control her trembling as she waited, waited, the knife firmly gripped in her fingers. She heard water running, heard the familiar clink of metal on glass. He’d gotten another pitcher, poured fresh plaster into it, added water at the sink, and was stirring angrily, furiously.

He’d be in a hurry now to fulfill his mission. She had, for just that one second when she’d kicked out at the pitcher, taken away his power. How he must have hated that! He must need more than ever to create the image in the watercolor, to get that feeling of power and control again.

She would have to be fast, so fast …

If only she could remove the pads from her eyes.

But not yet … not yet … he mustn’t know her hands were free.

Her ears ached with the strain of such intense listening. Just a few more minutes …

Footsteps … approaching her table … the sloshing of the mixed plaster …

“Now, you lie perfectly still,” he said, his voice icy, “or I’m going to kill you right here and now and do your mask afterward.”

She waited just a fraction of a second and then brought her hand out from behind her and slashed out blindly with the razor-sharp X-Acto knife.

A scream of pain and rage told her she’d connected.

Still holding the knife, Rachel threw herself sideways, off the table and onto the floor. As she fell, the pads over her eyes slid sideways and then, as she jumped to her feet, dropped to the floor.

She could see.

And the person standing before her, staring in disbelief at the gashed, bleeding arm held up, dripping red on the tile floor, wasn’t Aidan McKay, not Joseph Milano, not even Rudy Samms.

It was Samantha Widdoes.

They stared at each other, Rachel’s eyes stunned, Samantha’s hot with rage.

“You?” Rachel managed. “How? I don’t understand. Why?”

Samantha grabbed a smock from the table behind her and wrapped it around her wounded arm. Her mouth twisted as she sneered, “You don’t know what it was like! No one appreciated my work! They all said it was weak. ‘Wishy-washy pastels,’ Joseph called them. But I can’t work in oils. You heard them at the exhibit. Everyone hated that seascape. They all said my paintings were weak.”

“Sam …”

“Well, I showed them, didn’t I?” Samantha’s perfect cheekbones were an angry scarlet. “Weak?
Weak?
When I can paint something and then make it happen!
They
can’t do that, none of them. I’m the only one who can. I’m the one with all the power.”

Rachel’s mind raced. She had to get out of this room. But Sam was standing between her and the door. And she was so full of rage and hate, that even with a wounded arm, Rachel would be no match for her. “But Sam,” she said softly, “no one
knows
you’ve got that power, so what good does it do you? You didn’t sign the paintings, and I was the only one who saw the hidden images. You should tell everyone. You should share your power, so they’ll know.”

A crafty smile lit Samantha’s face. “Oh, no. I thought that, too, at first. But that would spoil everything. I’d have to stop then, and I don’t want to. Not for a long, long time. It’s enough for me that
I
know. That’s why I have to kill you, Rachel, because you saw the images. I thought I hid them so cleverly.” She tilted her head at Rachel, the expression on her face one of simple curiosity. “Why was it only you who saw them? You don’t know anything about art.”

“Maybe that’s why.” Rachel reached out slowly, easily, to place both hands on the edge of the table. She knew it was on wheels, because it had moved slightly beneath her when she was trying to wrestle the knife from her pocket. “I wasn’t judging your work artistically, like the others were. I was just looking at the painting to see what was in it.”

“And you found it,” Sam said, a trace of regret in her voice. “Well, that’s too bad, Rachel. I like you. I think we could have been friends. But I have no choice now. You can see that, can’t you?” Her voice hardened, “I’m
not
giving up my power.”

“But …” Rachel said, desperately trying to stall for time. “How did you start your … creating?”

“It was an accident in the beginning,” Samantha said.

Rachel’s grip on the table tightened.

“I had this vision of someone standing on the riverbank fishing, of someone pushing him over the edge toward the waterfall, and so I sketched it. The drawing was so much more exciting than stupid, pale flowers. Joseph would have loved it.”

Rachel apologized silently to Joseph. The sketches hadn’t been his, but Samantha’s.

“Then I painted the image into the seascape, so cleverly that no one would notice. And later I took the baseball bat and went looking for someone fishing. I knew there’d be someone there, and I didn’t care who it was. I didn’t even know Ted Leonides. When I’d done what the vision told me to do, I felt so strong, so powerful, Rachel. It was wonderful! And,” Samantha shrugged, “I knew I’d get another vision. And I did.” She laughed, a thin shrill sound. “That’s why Milo’s in the hospital.” She looked at Rachel again, her eyes bright. “You knew Milo had been pushed, didn’t you? How did you know he hadn’t just fallen?”

“It’s a gift,” Rachel said flatly, unwilling to share “visions” with this cold-blooded, power-hungry maniac.

“They said my work was weak,” Samantha said almost absentmindedly, as if she were talking to herself. “Weak! Which meant that
I
was.” To Rachel, she said slyly, “But I’m not, am I, Rachel? You’d testify to that if you could, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” Rachel said calmly. “I’d testify that you are a weak, sneaky little coward.”

Samantha’s cheeks flamed, and her eyes turned dark with fury. “Get back on the table,” she commanded in a completely different voice, this one hard and cold. She seemed unaware that Rachel’s hands had a firm grip on the table’s edge. “You’re not going to ruin this for me.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, “I am.” And with one strong, desperate push, she shoved the table forward, pinning a startled Samantha between it and the smaller table behind her.

With a roar of rage, Sam lunged forward to push herself free. But the floor beneath her was still wet and slippery from the spilled liquid plaster. She slipped, slid, her feet went out from under her, and with a look of total surprise on her face, she slammed to the floor. There was a sudden, sickening crack as the back of her skull hit the hard tile. Then silence.

Shaking violently, Rachel stayed where she was for several seconds, expecting Samantha at any second to jump to her feet and attack.

But nothing happened.

Slowly, tentatively, Rachel moved around the edge of the table to look down.

Samantha lay on the floor, her eyes closed. Her face was free of rage now, and seemed peaceful and sweet. Innocent. Even … even gentle. The real Samantha, the cruel, power-mad Samantha, was hiding now, like the images in her gentle, innocent watercolors.

But she had been unmasked. And no amount of plaster in the world could hide who she really was.

Rachel glanced up at the big, round clock high on the wall.

Twelve-ten.

Monday.

It was Monday.

And she was alive.

Rachel stepped around Samantha and left the room.

T
HEY STOOD IN THE
art building lobby, watching as Samantha was taken away on a stretcher. Aidan had an arm around Rachel, who was pale but steady on her feet, and Rudy and Bibi, visibly shaken, were holding hands.

“She picked Milo almost at random,” Rachel said. “The night of the party, she must have scouted the house, checked out the rooms and picked his because it was right on the fire escape. So she could fulfill the image she’d hidden in the watercolor.”

Rachel knew that none of her friends were grasping what had happened. They had known Samantha longer than they had known Rachel, and had had no inkling of Samantha’s hidden rage about her work. They were all in shock.

There would be plenty of time later to fill them in, explain that Sam had locked her in the closet, left the charm on her pillow, pushed the heavy pot off the terrace, sent the calendar page, tried to kill her because Rachel alone saw the hidden images in the paintings.

They would believe it now. They wouldn’t understand about her dreams and her ability to see in Samantha’s paintings what no one else had, but that didn’t matter. Not really.

She was certain of one thing. Now that she had stopped the fulfillment of the worst nightmare of all—her own murder—she would have no more dreams. She felt it in her head and in her heart. They were finished.