The Coffin (Nightmare Hall) (21 page)

Rachel awoke soaked with sweat and shaking so violently, the headboard of her bed was knocking against the wall.

“What’s going on?” Bibi muttered. But she didn’t awaken. When Rachel didn’t answer, because shock and fear had rendered her incapable of speech, Bibi rolled over and fell silent again.

Rachel shrank back against the wall, clutching the bedding to her chest. Her body was icy with sweat, her teeth chattering, her eyes as wide with terror as the eyes of the drowning victim.

She knew that fisherman. Ted Leonides, from math. Tall, quiet in class, but she’d thought she’d noticed an adventurous look in his eyes.

Why had she been dreaming about Ted Leonides? She hardly knew him.

Rachel sat up, still trembling violently. She drew a tissue from the box on her night table and wiped her face with it. Her long nightshirt was soaked with sweat, and she was freezing, in spite of the mild breeze coming in through the window. She glanced at the illuminated alarm clock beside the tissue box. Five-thirty
A.M
. Campus was still dark, everyone else sensibly asleep.

Only Rachel Seaver sat on the edge of her bed trembling and sick and frightened because of a bad dream.

On shaky legs, she got up to change into a dry nightshirt, trying to still her thundering heart. It was only a dream, she told herself, as her grandmother would have done, and it’s over. You’re awake now, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.

When she had changed into dry clothing, she crawled back into bed. But the dry T-shirt did nothing to warm her insides, which were still icy with fear.

It had been so
real,
that nightmare. Unlike any she’d ever had before. And she’d had many, when she was young. After the sudden, shocking death of her parents in a taxicab accident while on vacation, she had moved into her grandmother’s big old, Victorian house. It was full of dark nooks and crannies and strange, unsettling sounds. Sleeping in the huge, drafty, second-floor bedroom at the end of a dark hallway, Rachel had suffered for a long time from night terrors that had kept her grandmother, who was wrestling with her own grief, up night after night.

It had nearly undone both of them.

But they’d got through it and come out on the other side, and after a very long time, the night terrors had ended.

Until tonight.

Again she wondered why she had been dreaming about Ted Leonides.

Rachel had never seen anyone die, except on television and in the movies. She tried to tell herself that the nightmare was exactly the same thing. A dream was every bit as unreal as anything on film. More so, because at least on film, there actually were real people, actors, doing and saying what you were seeing. In a dream, not even that much was real.

Telling herself that didn’t help. Because dream or not, she had
seen
Ted die. He had been hit on the back of the head by a horrible creature all in black, he had flown out over the water and then into it, and then she had watched him descend over the waterfall and onto the rocks below. She had seen the shock, the terror in his eyes, seen it as clearly as if she’d been standing on the riverbank as it happened.

So it really was as if she
had seen
someone die.

And he hadn’t died accidentally. That made it so much worse. He hadn’t just died, like someone who’d been sick for a long time, or, like her parents, in a car wreck. Someone had
made
it happen. Someone had
killed
him.

Huddled deep within her blankets, Rachel shuddered again.

That was when she remembered the painting, as if the shudder had shaken the sight of it back into her mind. The painting. The seascape at the exhibit. The drowning figure no one else had seen. In the painting, the figure’s arms were flailing, just as Ted’s had been in her nightmare. The eyes in the painting had been wide with fear, like his in her dream, the mouth open in that same terrible, silent scream.

The painting. Was
that
why she’d had the nightmare? Because of that painting and what she thought she’d seen within its strokes of vivid green and brilliant blue?

Rachel latched on to the thought as a possible, reasonable explanation for the nightmare. An explanation that made sense. Except … except that it didn’t explain why she had seen Ted Leonides in her dream. Why not someone she knew better? Or someone who had disagreed with her about what was in the painting, like that rude waiter? That would make more sense.

Maybe dreams weren’t supposed to make sense.

She lay there, eyes wide open, for a long time, trying to forget the nightmare, until a pale, silvery dawn crept in through the wide window.

Finally, she drifted back into sleep. When she awoke a second time, the sun lit up the room and her digital clock read eight forty-five. Saturday morning. No classes for her. Rachel rolled over and would have returned to sleep if the door hadn’t opened to let Bibi in, armed with two steaming cups of coffee. She kicked the door closed behind her, but instead of bringing Rachel the coffee, she said in an odd voice, “Rachel,” and then backed up to her own bed and sank down on it as if her legs would no longer support her.

Rachel pulled herself to a sitting position. Bibi’s cheeks were the same off-white as the wall behind her, and her eyes looked slightly glazed as she stared at her roommate. “Rachel?” she said again.

“Bibi, what’s wrong?”

Bibi’s large blue eyes moved to Rachel’s face. “You know that guy Ted Leonides?” she asked.

Rachel’s heart stopped beating.

Because she didn’t answer, Bibi mistook her silence for an inability to identify Ted Leonides. “The tall skinny redhead we see heading for the river sometimes with a fishing pole, remember?”

Rachel struggled to find her voice. She finally managed to choke out, “What about him? What about Ted Leonides?”

Bibi’s voice, when it came, seemed to Rachel to be miles and miles away, as if Bibi were trying to tell her something from the opposite end of a long, dark tunnel.

“He’s dead, Rachel. He went fishing last night, and he fell over the waterfall and drowned in the pool at the bottom.”

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Diane Hoh (b. 1937) is a bestselling author of young-adult fiction. Born in Warren, Pennsylvania, Hoh grew up with eight siblings and parents who encouraged her love of reading from an early age. After high school, she spent a year at St. Bonaventure University before marrying and raising three children. She and her family moved often, finally settling in Austin, Texas.

Hoh sold two stories to
Young Miss
magazine, but did not attempt anything longer until her children were fully grown. She began her first novel,
Loving That O’Connor Boy
(1985), after seeing an ad in a publishing trade magazine requesting submissions for a line of young-adult fiction. Although the manuscript was initially rejected, Hoh kept writing, and she soon completed her second full-length novel,
Brian’s Girl
(1985). One year later, her publisher reversed course, buying both novels and launching Hoh’s career as a young-adult author.

After contributing novels to two popular series, Cheerleaders and the Girls of Canby Hall, Hoh found great success writing thrillers, beginning with
Funhouse
(1990), a Point Horror novel that became a national bestseller. Following its success, Hoh created the Nightmare Hall series, whose twenty-nine novels chronicle a university plagued by dark secrets. After concluding Nightmare Hall with 1995’s
The Voice in the Mirror
, Hoh wrote
Virus
(1996), which introduced the seven-volume Med Center series, which charts the challenges and mysteries of a hospital in Massachusetts.

In 1998, Hoh had a runaway hit with
Titanic: The Long Night
, a story of two couples—one rich, one poor—and their escape from the doomed ocean liner. That same year, Hoh released
Remembering the Titanic
, which picked up the story one year later. Together, the two were among Hoh’s most popular titles. She continues to live and write in Austin.

An eleven-year-old Hoh with her best friend, Margy Smith. Hoh’s favorite book that year was
Lad: A Dog
by Albert Payson Terhune.

A card from Hoh’s mother written upon the publication of her daughter’s first book. Says Hoh, “This meant everything to me. My mother was a passionate reader, as was my dad.”

Hoh and her mother in Ireland in 1985. Hoh recalls, “I kissed the Blarney Stone, which she said was redundant because I already had the ‘gift of gab.’ Later, I would use some of what we saw there in
Titanic: The Long Night
as Paddy, Brian, and Katie deported from Ireland.”

An unused publicity photo of Hoh.

Hoh with her daughter Jenny in Portland, Oregon, in 2008. Says Hoh, “While there, I received a call from a young filmmaker in Los Angeles who wanted to make
The Train
into a film. They ran out of money before the project got off the ground. Such is life.”