Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall) (3 page)

That raw, open horror in his face is because Ted Leonides knows he is being swept straight toward the waterfall that plunges to the rocks below.

And he knows there is nothing he can do to stop his helpless rush toward certain death.

He is right.

It takes only minutes.

The figure in black on the riverbank, the bat dangling from its left hand, watches in satisfied silence as the young fisherman is swept away, arms still flailing, his mouth still open in a scream silenced by the muddy water pouring into it.

As he is ripped backward toward the waterfall, his attacker tosses the bloody bat into the water. Then he turns and hurries along the riverbank to watch. He arrives at Lookout Point, the top of the hill where visitors come to view the waterfall, at the precise moment when the now-unconscious body is swept over the crest of the falls, spiraling down, down, amid the roar and rumble of the water, into the raging whirlpool and the jagged rocks below.

This time, Ted Leonides doesn’t resurface.

He is gone.

The figure in black turns and hurries away,
d
isappearing into the woods like a black shadow erased by the sun.

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.”

S
ILENCE FELL OVER THE
room as Rachel tried desperately to reject what she thought she’d heard Bibi say. Bibi couldn’t have said that. Not possible. Too awful to even consider.

It’s just the nightmare, she told herself firmly. I wasn’t quite awake when Bibi came into the room and I was still thinking about that horrible dream, so I imagined that she said Ted was dead. But, of course, she couldn’t have.

And then Bibi said it again. “Rachel?” she said, leaning forward slightly on her bed, the two cups of coffee still in her hands. “Did you hear what I said? Ted Leonides is dead. Drowned. Why don’t you say something?”

From some faraway place where Bibi’s words couldn’t reach her, Rachel wondered idly why Bibi was still holding onto those coffee cups. Weren’t they hot? Why wasn’t she burning her fingers on them?

Oh, of course. This was still part of the dream and so Bibi’s fingers weren’t burning because none of this was real.

“Rachel, you’re scaring me!
Say
something, or I’m going to go get our R. A.”

Still Rachel said nothing. She sat frozen and silent on her bed, her face drained of color, her eyes glazed, the bedding clutched to her chest.

Bibi waited a few more minutes. When she continued to get no response from her roommate, she jumped up, deposited the coffee cups on a small table, and ran from the room.

She was back a few minutes later with a sturdy, dark-haired girl in tow. “You have to do something,” Bibi was saying to their resident advisor, Carmella Diaz, as the two entered the room. “All I did was tell her Ted Leonides drowned last night. I don’t understand why she’s taking it like this. We hardly knew him.”

The R.A. sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed. “Rachel, snap out of it!” she said crisply, gently shaking Rachel’s right shoulder.

Rachel’s head swiveled slightly, and she stared blankly at Carmella as if she’d never seen her before. Then, very slowly, her eyes cleared, and when she opened her mouth, she said quietly, “It’s not true, is it? Ted isn’t really dead, is he?”

“Yes. And I know it’s horrible, it really is. Everyone’s in shock. But Bibi said you hardly knew him, Rachel. Why are you taking it so hard?”

Rachel’s mind was working again. She knew she couldn’t tell them about the dream. If she said aloud, “Because I
saw
it happen, all of it, every single, sickening minute of it,” Carmella and Bibi would cart her off to the loony bin.

Rachel reacted as she always did when she wasn’t sure what to do. She became defensive. “Why shouldn’t I take it hard?” she cried. “Someone was killed last night!” She realized as soon as she said it that she shouldn’t have said “killed.” Bibi had made Ted’s death sound accidental.

“I mean,” she hastily amended, “someone
died
last night. It’s horrible. So I don’t think I overreacted at all.”

“Yes, you did,” Bibi said. “You acted as if your best friend had died.”

Rachel shuddered. “No, I didn’t. It’s just that Ted is … was … in one of my classes and I liked him. You walked in and said he was dead, just like that, without any warning at all.” She glared at Bibi. “It’s a good thing you’re not planning to go into medicine. I can’t imagine you breaking bad news to your patients’ relatives.”

Bibi, her natural color restored to her face, nodded ruefully. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You know me. I just sort of let things spill out of my mouth and hope they’ll come out the right way. I guess this one didn’t. But,” she added in her own defense, “I’ve never had to tell anyone something so horrible before. How was I supposed to know the right way to do it?” She handed Rachel one of the cups and, taking the other over to her own bed, said, “I am sorry though, Rachel.” She sat down and sipped thoughtfully. “I guess hearing it that way was pretty awful for you.”

Seeing
it was even worse, Rachel thought, feeling sick. She wanted to tell them what she’d seen in her nightmare. But she didn’t dare. How could she possibly explain that she’d seen something in a dream before it had actually happened?

And anyway, it couldn’t have happened exactly the way she’d seen it, she told herself as the hot coffee began to warm her. What happened to Ted was an accident. A simple,
horrible
accident. He’d slipped on the muddy riverbank and fallen in, been swept over the waterfall. The detailed scene she’d witnessed in her nightmare was just a bizarre coincidence.

Very
bizarre.

The whole thing was bizarre. And horrible. Yesterday, Ted had been very much alive. She had seen him loping across campus with an armload of books. No fishing pole. He must have gone to the river after his classes were over for the day. And now, not even twenty-four hours later, he was dead.

Dead. Drowned, just as she’d seen in the nightmare.

Satisfied that Rachel was herself again, Carmella got up to leave.

“Did anyone see it happen?” Rachel asked suddenly, unable to stop herself. “Ted’s accident? Did someone see it?”

Carmella shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Two guys biking along the river path found him this morning, floating facedown in one of the eddies. His shirt was caught on a branch, I guess, or he would have been long gone, with the current the way it is now.”

When she had gone, Rachel drank the last of her coffee. She needed to tell someone about the nightmare. Her chest ached with the weight of it.

But who could she tell?

Not Bibi. Bibi Jensen was a no-nonsense farm girl who believed firmly that the only way to cope with life was to meet it head-on, without illusions. She was proud of saying she had never believed in Santa Claus, had never read a fairy tale in her life or had a daydream, wasn’t the tiniest bit superstitious and had no faith in signs or omens or dreams of any sort, good or bad.

Bibi would dismiss Rachel’s nightmare as swiftly as she’d flick a piece of lint off her navy-blue sweater.

The police, then? Rachel slipped out of bed and began to dress in jeans and a Salem University sweatshirt over a white T-shirt. Should she go to the police? If they were convinced that Ted’s death had been accidental, would they even bother with an investigation?

Not on the basis of someone’s nightmare, they wouldn’t.

The thought of walking into the Twin Falls police station or the campus security office and saying, “I had this dream …” made Rachel want to laugh aloud.

It was a nightmare, Rachel, she told herself firmly, and that’s
all
it was. You do not have ESP. Get over it.

Getting outside helped. On a beautiful Saturday morning in spring, campus was alive with joggers and bikers, runners, and students hurrying to and from classes. Carmella had said that everyone was in shock about Ted’s death, but it didn’t seem so to Rachel. Although there were some white faces and eyes wide with disbelief, life seemed to be going on as usual.