Captives (Nightmare Hall) (15 page)

Too late now
…

I
N NIGHTINGALE HALL’S FOYER,
Molloy’s feet halted in mid-stride, as if she’d suddenly hit a barricade.

He was gone!

The clothesline was gone, too. The glow of the candlelight revealed only the stairs.

She stood perfectly still, thinking for just a moment that she had imagined the whole thing: his arm around her neck, striking him with the telephone, tying him to the railing. Had she dreamed all of that?

No. It happened. She had left him unconscious, tied to the stair railing.

How long had he been free?

And where
was
he now? Molloy’s terrified eyes quickly scanned the hall, but she saw nothing but dark, candle-softened shadows.

Toni! Alone, in the kitchen. He could have gone upstairs and back down again by the back staircase.

Molloy whirled and raced back to the kitchen, so fast the breeze she created blew out the candle she was carrying. She kept going, anyway, feet flying along the faded carpet until she was on the linoleum again and at Toni’s side. Her eyes quickly darted from one corner of the long, narrow room to another, looking for movement, a shadow, anything that would tell her they weren’t alone. She saw nothing, heard nothing but the rain blowing in through the broken window and slapping into the sink.

Toni was conscious, but not alert. Her eyes were clouded, her mouth slack.

Anyway, it’s
me
he wants, she thought, getting up. He’s already punished Toni, and in the shape she’s in, she’s no threat to him.

She had to have a light. Darkness was too much of a disadvantage, especially if he had a flashlight. She needed to even the odds a little.

Moving quickly to the stove, Molloy lit all four of the gas burners. The flames did provide a minimal glow to the middle section of the kitchen.

What else could she do? There had to be something …

He must have removed his muddy shoes, or she would have seen footprints in the hall. Tightening her lips in resolve, Molloy went to the kitchen cabinets to take out two tall, glass tumblers. With the glasses in hand, she hurried to the open archway between the hall and the kitchen and flung one of the glasses to the floor. It shattered, as she had known it would, into a pile of shards at the threshold. Let him step over
that
in nothing but socks. It might not stop him, but it should slow him down.

She took two more glasses into the bedroom, smashing one at the foot of the staircase, another in the doorway after she had backed out of the room.

She
had
to keep him away from her. She was the only one left to protect Lynne and Toni. The only one …

“Hey, there, what’s all that racket out there in the kitchen? I can’t have that. You’re disturbing my peace and quiet.”

The voice seemed to come out of nowhere, out of everywhere. Molloy felt as if it were all around her, like a cloud of toxic smoke, making her eyes water with tears of fright and her breath catch in her throat.

“You and your friends make lousy guests, you know that? You’d think you’d watch your manners, after intruding where you’re not wanted. But oh, no, you just keep making noise and noise and more noise, and I CAN’T STAND IT ANOTHER SECOND!”
Shouting now, screaming, the voice coming closer and closer.

Molloy backed up to the stove. Her eyes never leaving the doorway, she reached behind her to grab the handle of the teakettle, still sitting on a lit burner.

And screamed in pain as the red-hot metal handle touched the flesh of her palm.

“Screaming already? But I haven’t even touched a hair on your head yet. Or are you just practicing? Good idea. Nothing like being prepared.”

Molloy bit her lower lip to keep from screaming again. She ran to the sink to run cold water on her burned hand, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now. I can’t do this, she thought in terror and misery, I don’t
want
to do this.

“You shouldn’t have come here,”
the eerie, disembodied voice called. She thought it was coming from the hallway. He had heard her scream, and was headed straight for the kitchen. But she saw no light. If he didn’t have a light, he wouldn’t see the glass shards she had strewn in the doorway.

She could only hope and pray that he didn’t have his shoes on. If he did, he’d just walk right over the glass. Wouldn’t even slow him down.

“This isn’t your place. It’s mine. I would have been fine if you hadn’t showed up. Why didn’t you just leave me alone? It’s not my fault, what happened to your friends. And it’s not my fault what’s going to happen to you. You’re to blame, all of you, for trespassing.”

“You
trespassed first!” Molloy shouted angrily. She spotted the bottom half of her skirt, a pile of discarded black fabric, lying below the stove. Ran over and picked it up, wrapped it around the burn on her right palm. Reached for the teakettle again, her hand protected by the wad of worn cloth, lifted the lid off the kettle and dropped it on the stove. She held the teakettle up, toward the doorway. Steam rose like smoke.

Molloy never took her eyes off the kitchen doorway. Her right arm, holding the teakettle high, shook violently, but she never eased her grip.

The voice had stopped, but she knew he was still coming. She could
feel
it. Any second now, she expected to see a dark form looming in the kitchen archway, or the sound of a cry of pain as he waded unwittingly into her pile of broken glass.

She was as ready as she could be.

Her eyes remained fixated on the doorway as if she were hypnotized.

But when she did hear a sound, it wasn’t a scream of pain, and it didn’t come from the kitchen archway directly in front of her. It came from ten feet further down the kitchen wall, in the bedroom doorway. There was a clearing of the throat, and then, as Molloy’s head swivelled in shock and her eyes flew to the source of the sound, the voice said with amusement,
“Expecting someone, are we?”

Molloy shrank back against the stove. Bitter disappointment washed over her. The broken glass had been ineffective. Even with only the light from the burners, she could see the gray-white of his sneakers. He had put his shoes back on, after all.

Lynne’s baseball bat was dangling from one hand.

“I’m not crazy like he said I was. Well, he didn’t use that word, but he implied it. Wanted me to take the blame for my rotten life, when I had told him and
told
him that it wasn’t my fault. He made that sound crazy.”

“You mean that psychologist on campus,” Molloy said. He looked enormous standing there in the doorway, almost filling it up. She couldn’t see his face, and didn’t want to. If she looked upon the face of a killer, she might never be able to forget it. “I know you’re the one who killed him. But I don’t see why you had to hurt my friends. What did you do to Daisy?”

“Who’s Daisy?”
His voice was lazy, uninterested. He stayed where he was, kicking idly with one sneakered foot at the slices and chunks and bits of glass that Molloy had placed there.

She knew he was playing with her. He believed that he had all the time in the world. And he probably believed, too, that she wasn’t going to give him much of a fight.

Well, he was wrong. She had never been this terrified in her life, not ever. He was so much bigger than she was, and he’d already proved that it didn’t trouble him at all to take a life. But he couldn’t have hers. She wanted it. No matter how tough it got, how much it stank sometimes, how awful her parents were to Ernie, she still wanted her life. Because … because it was
hers.

“How can I tell you what I did to this Daisy person if I don’t know who she is?”

“You know who she is. You pushed one of my friends out of a window, and you attacked that police officer. And then you followed Daisy out of the house.”

“Oh,
that
one. Choked her. Strangled her.”

Molloy had to clutch the edge of the stove to remain upright. Oh, God, Daisy.

“Thought about tossing her into the creek. Man, you should see that thing now. It’s a raging torrent! Had a real hard time getting back up here after that business with your Daisy-person. Could have killed her in the woods, but I had to get to the cop’s car, anyway, to disable the radio.”
A laugh, crude and cruel.
“Killed two birds with one stone, you might say. Didn’t throw her in the creek, though. Thought there might be a tiny chance that the cold water would revive her.”
Another laugh.
“Didn’t want that, I can tell you.”

While he was talking, he began playing with the baseball bat, hoisting it into the air, tossing it from one hand to the other, as if he were taunting her with it.

She knew what it would do to her skull, that bat. And it wouldn’t bother him at all to do it.

She let him talk, her eyes circling the room. Back door. Locked. He had the key. No exit there. Then to the cellar door. Ditto. Then to the open window over the sink. The rain had stopped. There was no more windblown water spilling in through the hole she and Daisy had created.

Molloy fought the urge to laugh. The rain had stopped, the high water would go down quickly, the roads would clear, Ernie would be expecting her … but if the mad creature in the bedroom doorway had anything to say about it, Molloy Book wouldn’t be continuing on to the campus of Salem University.

She had to stop his stupid, rambling conversation. Maybe he had all the time in the world, but Lynne and Toni didn’t. Officer Reardon didn’t. And maybe Molloy Book didn’t either. She had to find out, one way or the other. She was ready. As ready as she’d ever be.

“I’m glad we came here,” she said. “If we hadn’t, no one would have known where you were. Now, you’ll get caught. We’ll tell.” It sounded ridiculous even to her own ears, but she was hoping it would make him mad, stir him into action.

He threw his head back, laughing loudly. “
Oh
,
yeah, right, like any of you is going to be leaving this house. You’re my captives, haven’t you figured that out by now? You’re not going anywhere,”

“I am,” she said and, still holding the teakettle in her fabric-wrapped hand, turned and ran for the open window. He would have to run after her. That was what she wanted.

He was on her in seconds, yanking her shoulder, whirling her around to face him, shouting,
“You’re not going anywhere!”

“Neither are you!” Molloy shouted back, and threw the contents of the teakettle in his face.

He screamed, staggered backward, cursing her.

And he dropped the bat.

Molloy bent, scooped it up, gripped it tightly, holding it over her shoulder as if she were about to receive a pitch.

Someone pounded on the back door. “Molloy! Molloy, are you in there?”

Without taking her eyes off the staggering, cursing figure, his hands to his face, Molloy shouted, “Ernie? Is that you?”

“Molloy, open the door!”

“Can’t. Locked. Come to the open win …”

At the sound of yet another interloper, her attacker let out a bellow of rage and threw himself at her, his hands reaching out to encircle her throat. His beefy face was scalded red, his eyes tearing, the flesh on his lips already beginning to peel.

Molloy would never forget the sight of that face coming at her.

She couldn’t hit him with the bat. Instead, she lowered it and hit him full force across his knees.

The blow stopped him just as his hands were about to fasten around her neck. He let out a scream. After a long, agonizing moment for Molloy when he stood right in front of her, hands still reaching for her, he sank to the floor and then toppled sideways, striking his left temple on the heavy metal handle of the dishwasher.

The sight of his eyes closing was the most wonderful sight Molloy had ever seen.

Weak with relief, she, too, sank to the floor, sagging against the white cabinets, trying to catch her breath.

A voice above her at the broken window called, “Molloy? Where are you?”

“I’m here, Ernie,” she gasped, “I’m here.”

T
HEY WERE GATHERED IN
Lynne’s hospital room. Toni’s room was down the hall, but she was sleeping peacefully. Daisy had already been released, and was sitting on the floor with her back against Molloy’s chair,

“Dr. Leo should have known better than to suggest that Arthur go on a diet,” Ernie said. He was standing behind Molloy’s chair, his hands on her shoulders. “I remember once at Vinnie’s, Elise asked Arthur if he really thought he needed that third burger, and he didn’t speak to her for a week.”

“He told me,” Elise said from her station at the window, “that it was his mother’s fault that he was heavy. That she used to make him sit at the table until he’d finished every bite of his dinner, and then she’d force dessert on him. He said she weighs about three hundred pounds and he thought she wanted him to look like her. ‘Misery loves company,’ was what Arthur said, and that’s when I knew how miserable he really was, how much he hated being fat. But he never thought it was his own fault.”

“I guess Leo told him it was,” Simon said. He was sitting on the foot of Lynne’s bed. “I should have guessed it was him when Ernie asked him to tell the cops that Ernie had done it and Arthur said, ‘You want us to lie to the cops?’ No one really knew who the killer was. It
could
have been Ernie. Sorry, Ern,” grinning at Ernie. “The only reason Arthur knew for a fact that it would have been a lie was, Arthur himself had killed Dr. Leo. I just never picked up on it.”

“None of us did,” Elise said. “I knew Arthur had been out running around in the rain. He said he’d been in the computer room, but his clothes were soaked to the skin. He couldn’t have got that wet just going from one building to another. But I didn’t pick up on that, either, Simon. And then when we were supposed to be going to the police to tell them that Ernie had lied, he said he was feeling sick and could I help him up to his room? Like a fool, I did. Then he tossed me in the closet, locked it, and left. I had to scream my lungs out for hours before someone heard me over the noise of the storm and came to let me out.”