The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) Page 2
Bianca's parents had broken down weeping. They'd hugged the Shipleys. They'd hugged Little Katie. Everyone had hugged everyone else.
Mrs. Winters had protested. "Bianca was only doing what any babysitter would do. You don't have to give her money as a reward!"
Mrs. Shipley had slipped her arm around Bianca's shoulders. "Bianca saved Little Katie's life! If it weren't for your brave daughter, I would have been holding a funeral. My daughter's life is worth any amount of money."
"But — but I didn't do anything for Little Katie! I never made it to your house!" Bianca had burst out. "I was in my house thinking I was going to be late. I must have fallen asleep. Did I fall down the stairs? What am I doing here?" Bianca had looked around.
She hadn't felt any soreness or stiffness in her arms and legs as she sat there in the hospital bed. She would feel something if she'd fallen down the stairs and broken a bone. She'd sprained her ankle once when she'd been in grade school. That had felt mean — real, real mean.
Her mother had sobbed, "Honey, don't you remember anything at all?" She had covered her face with her hands. Her father had looked at Bianca sadly and patted her mother on the back.
Only then had Bianca noticed the entire police department from St. Simons Island standing in the back of the room. They had slowly approached the bed until she had been surrounded.
"Miss Winters," the police chief had addressed her, "you deserve a police medal, maybe a Presidential Medal of Honor for bravery, for what you did last night. You not only saved this little baby's life, you grappled with a bloody murderer and didn't run away. You are the sole surviving witness — besides Little Katie who's much too young to remember anything — to one of the most brutal slayings this island has ever known."
"You've got the wrong person!" Bianca had felt protest surge through her body as she had shrunk back in her bed. "I — I wasn't there. I — I didn't see anything. I'm not brave."
"Shock and denial is a common reaction," Doc had announced in a supremely confident tone from another corner of the hospital room.
"Doc" Ernie McCollough lived in the same subdivision Bianca did, Churchyard Oaks. It was next to the Christ's Church Graveyard, overhung with live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. He lived on the other side of the street, the richer side, beside the Shipleys.
He'd been the senior class valedictorian when he graduated two years early from high school, at sixteen. He had been one of the most brilliant students ever, with perfect SAT scores and a National Merit Finalist ranking. He'd had a complete academic scholarship to attend Northern Florida University in Jacksonville, from which he had graduated in only three years at age nineteen.
Though his father was a history professor and his mother was descended from one of the island's oldest families, though no one in his family had gone into the profession before, Doc had decided to attend medical school. He had been in his third year that day, assigned to her ward at Brunswick Memorial Hospital. He'd taken an interest in Bianca's case from the beginning.
"Your brain denies something too horrible to remember. It's a way of protecting yourself," Doc had explained to Bianca.
He was a short guy, not much taller than Bianca. He looked younger than his age, twenty-two. He had a big presence with those thick, horn-rimmed glasses. His dark brown hair was cut straight around his head as if a bowl had been placed over it.
"We can prove you were there, Miss Winters," the police chief had asserted. "We've got tissue, hair, fingerprint and fiber evidence of you all over the house. We could write the script and say first you did this and then you did that. We can number the locations where you were in the house, from the time you were watching the TV to the time you went up the stairs, grabbed Little Katie from her crib, met the murderer on the stairs, stumbled over Mrs. Ingersoll's body, and ran screaming down the street."
Bianca had gaped at the police in wonderment.
"What we can't write into the script is the identity of the killer. He was clever enough not to leave any hair or fiber evidence. He must have been wearing gloves. There were no fingerprints. We have no way of tracing him unless you can remember him — what he was wearing, what he looked like, his voice. Something!"
"Honey," her mother had gripped Bianca's hand as if her life had depended upon it, and asked again, "can't you remember anything!"
"I tell you it wasn't me. It wasn't!" Bianca hadn't wanted to be a hero.
"It's no use trying to force Bianca." Doc had paced about the room as he lectured them. "She'll remember in her own good time, or she won't remember at all. The sole witness to a murder often takes the identity of the killer to the grave. Or she might remember in fifty years. She may put on a dress someday. Voila! The killer was wearing clothing of the same color. Or she'll be stirring a stew ten years from now. She'll suddenly see the killer's face in the stew. The aroma of the stew will remind her that it's the same thing that she was cooking on the night of the murder. The human brain's a strange thing. We have to respect it and play by its rules. It won't play by ours."
"We'll have to ask the grown-ups then," the police chief had said. "What exactly do any of you remember?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Shipley were driving up the street coming back from a dinner dance at the Cloister Hotel last night. They said they heard somebody screaming, racing down the road toward them," Mrs. Winters had volunteered.
"We almost ran into Bianca," Mr. Shipley had recalled.
"I told my husband to hit the brakes. I had a strange feeling," Mrs. Shipley had added. "When I saw it was Bianca holding my baby, I almost fainted — especially when I saw she had blood on her shoes and jeans."
"We pulled her into the car with us and tried to get her to talk some sense," Mr. Shipley had continued. "All she did was cry for help as if she were on automatic pilot."
"We'd gone to bed hours before," Bianca's father had volunteered. "We heard shouting. We looked out the window, saw the Shipleys' Bentley, and remembered our daughter was babysitting there. We raced outside in our nightclothes."
"Bianca wouldn't let go of Little Katie," Mrs. Shipley had wept. "She had the child clutched to her breast and wouldn't let anybody come near — not even me."
"We could see that Little Katie was OK. Just scared," Mr. Shipley had added. "A squad car pulled up alongside us and asked if anything was wrong."
"The officer peered into the car and observed Bianca's condition. He also noticed all the blood," Bianca's mother added. "Then he asked where Bianca had just come from."
Mrs. Shipley had volunteered, "I told him she'd been babysitting at our house. You police know the story after that, after Bianca's parents leaped inside our car, too. We followed the police. The squad car stopped in front of our house. The lights were out. The front door was wide open."
Mr. Shipley had winced. "They brought the dead maid out on a stretcher. The expression frozen on her face was one of total disbelief." He had shaken his head.
"We want to thank you for escorting us to the hospital when we were in shock," Mrs. Shipley had added. "We might not have made it otherwise."
The police chief had nodded. "The nurses recorded that both Little Katie and Bianca checked in covered with blood. The baby had to be bathed. Bianca had to be washed and sedated. She was hysterical."
"You're imagining this. None of this happened." Bianca had shaken her head. "It's impossible!"
Doc had turned out the lights.
It had been as if someone had stuck a knife into Bianca's breast. A horrible pain had surged through her body, making her tremble. She had broken out into a cold sweat in the hospital bed. Her breath had come in gasps. Her head had swirled around. She had been overcome by white hot panic.
"No!" Bianca had moaned. "Help me! Please help!"
She had tried to climb out of her hospital bed. The Shipleys, her parents and the police chief had been forced to hold her down until she had stopped flailing about.
Doc had turned the lights back on. Bianca had felt better but drained, as if
someone had sucked the energy out of her.
"Now will you tell me that last night didn't happen?" Doc had looked at Bianca with a deep wisdom. His pointed stare had transfixed her and made her unable to turn away. "Were you scared of the dark last week?"
"Bianca wasn't scared of the dark even when she was a little girl!" her mother had exclaimed.
The police chief had reminded them,
"Remember, we found the power cut to the house from the outside. Everything must have happened in pitch darkness."
"'Even the murder?" Bianca's mother had groaned, unable to believe what had happened in her peaceful neighborhood.
"Even the murder!" the chief had confirmed.
That had been the beginning of Bianca's long, close friendship with Doc Ernie McCollough. He had started to act as her doctor, whom she liked and trusted more than any of the older doctors at the hospital. The senior doctors had been able to sense the growing confidence Bianca had in the medical student. They had assigned Doc the case on an outpatient basis as soon as Bianca had been released.
Doc had graduated from medical school and become an intern in psychiatry. He had convinced Bianca that she'd been at the Shipleys' house when Mrs. Ingersoll had been shot and tumbled down the stairs. Bianca's fear of the dark hadn't left her. It had been the one wound that had stubbornly refused to heal from that night onward — that and her lost memory.
For the past two years Bianca had been having a terrible time dealing with her new phobia. She had to sleep with the lights on. Bianca was so embarrassed by her fear of the dark that she'd never attended slumber parties since. She had shunned movies, telling the other kids that she liked videos and DVDs (which could be watched with the lights on).
She'd wanted to impress her new date, Rick. She had hoped that her fear of the dark wouldn't matter. Doc had bet her that she could do it if she set her mind to it.
Boy, had Doc been wrong!
The movie on the big, silver screen was getting bloodier. Bianca forced herself to watch it. Rick and the other kids in the theater screamed with delight. The woman that the killer had shot appeared wearing the bloody dress. She sneaked up behind him. She stuck the barrel of the gun into his back.
"But — but — you're dead!" he shrieked. "You can't come back from the grave!"
The lady called the "Black Widow" laughed. "You forgot something important."
The Black Widow pulled out a gold locket in the shape of a heart from inside the bodice of her dress. A bullet had deformed the outside of it but had not pierced it. She grinned as she pushed it up against his nose.
He shook his head and backed up, groaning. "No, no, no!"
"Yes!" The would-be victim proclaimed.
Still holding her pistol in one hand, the Black Widow popped open the locket with the other. Inside were two tiny color portraits, one of her and one of him.
"So this is how much you love me, is it?" A crazy look suffused her face. "Let me show how much I love you!"
"Mercy!" The man fell to his knees.
She fired three times. He collapsed on the ground dead.
Bianca looked down at her lap. All the gunfire, the screaming, the blood. . . It didn't matter if it was only a movie, if the actors drank Cokes together when the camera wasn't on them. She wished the lights would come back on. The darkness was pressing in around her. It made her pull at the neck of her T-shirt and cross and recross her legs. It made her wish that Doc were here. Only he could understand how she felt.
Two of the younger policemen on the force, who had graduated from high school only a year ago, waved at Bianca from across the aisle. They were with their dates, off-duty and out of uniform. She'd gotten to know the local police over the past two years. They had met with her every month or so and asked her if she had remembered anything about the killer. They had also questioned scores of "the usual suspects". Still there had been no arrests, despite the fact that the police detectives and evidence teams had examined the crime scene searching for clues for days after the slaying. The killer was still at large.
She cast the officers a sick smile and waved back.
"Hey, isn't this the best movie ever?" Rick stuck the gooey, butter-covered popcorn into her face again.
"Ye-yeah!"
"Don't you love the way the Black Widow came back from the dead?" he hissed. "It's a scream."
Bianca squeezed her eyelids shut. They popped open. Closing her eyes made the darkness more oppressive.
"Isn't it neat the way she's going berserk after she killed her lover? Hey, she must have wasted ten people already — including three cops!"
Bianca swallowed hard. She couldn't think of anything more cool. It made her want to puke. She didn't know what she would have done for the past two years without the support of the police force.
Rick went back to munching his popcorn so loudly and guzzling his Coke with such gusto that she thought he was drinking and chewing inside her head.
Bianca couldn't help but look around at the other kids. They were staring at the screen with murderous enthusiasm. Their eyes glowed. They hung on every word.
She wanted to scream, "Don't you guys know that this could be real? It isn't a game. People get murdered every day." She had to live under the threat of murder every day herself. The killer knew who she was, even if she could not remember his face.
Bianca's gaze rested on a familiar figure sitting on the other side of the theater near the front. It was "Doc" Ernie McCollough, wearing his trademark horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a nerd. He was here tonight after all! He was wearing one of his nicest suits, of which he must own a hundred. She could make out his pointed nose.
Bianca waved and tried to attract his attention. Doc wasn't looking her way. He was occupied with some gorgeous nurse from Brunswick Memorial Hospital. The young woman with the long, shapely legs was leaning all over him.
Doc had cautioned Bianca that she couldn't depend upon him all the time. She was almost eighteen, while he was almost twenty-three. Being more independent was part of the healing process. She had to get out with other kids, find a boyfriend, and make friends her own age.
Doc was only her junior medical adviser. More senior psychiatrists were ultimately in charge of her case. He couldn't be her best friend and substitute date as well. She had leaned on him when she'd gotten out of the hospital. He'd been new at this doctor business. He'd let her. They had become fast friends — perhaps a little more. Doc said that wasn't right. It was interfering with her development as well as his own objectivity in studying her case.
Bianca tore her eyes away from Doc and swallowed a sob, though it made her throat burn. She went back to looking at the other kids. The more she stared at them, the more they resembled monsters. Their teeth were turning into white fangs. Their eyes were glowing with a weird, red light. They were paler and leaner. The hands that clutched their popcorn boxes had sprouted long, red claws.
Bianca thought, Anyone could be the murderer. Anyone could have a handgun concealed in his pocket . . . a switchblade in his belt. Anyone could be looking at me right now . . . sneaking up right this minute to stab me in the back. . .
A hand landed on her shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream.
Chapter 3
"Hey, are you all right?" The usher shone his flashlight into her face. He was dressed in a long-sleeved, gray uniform with red stripes down the sides. He wore a matching cap. His big, dark eyes stared into hers.
"Ye-yes." Her voice quavered with emotion.
"Can I get you a Coke on the house?"
"No — no thank you. I'm not thirsty." She wished the usher hadn't surprised her.
The material of Rick's shirt tightened against his big shoulders as he leaned all the way across Bianca's seat. He was almost eyeball to eyeball with the usher.
"So, you're one of the Fellini brothers, huh? I don't think you're in any position to be bothering girls."
The usher pressed his lips together to form a tense, taut line.
"Sneaking up on Bianca and scaring her to death?" Rick sneered at Harry. "In about another six months you can join your brother in prison."
Harry's dark eyes flashed. He bit his lip. His lower lip trembled as he brushed his flyaway hair out of his eyes and marched up the aisle without a word.
"Harry didn't do anything! That was just his older brother, Mike Fellini, who went to jail," Bianca protested.
She noticed that the two off-duty policemen were following Harry with their eyes.
"One rotten apple in the bunch makes them all rotten." Rick stuffed his mouth with buttered popcorn. "The whole Fellini family belongs in jail."
Why had she gone out with such a bigoted lout even if he did have a lot of friends? She supposed it was because she'd never been asked to go out on a date before. Before that terrifying night she'd been quite shy. Doc had been so eager for her to find someone to have fun with. He had insisted that she was too grim and solitary. She'd wanted to impress him.
She glanced at Doc in desperation. He was still occupied with the sexy nurse from Brunswick Memorial Hospital. He wasn't going to save her from Rick Roscoe. She would have to do it all by herself.
"Ex-excuse me, ah — I need to use the rest room." Bianca started up the aisle. She had to escape this heavy, oppressive darkness. The air seemed so thick. It weighed down on her lungs.
Glowing yellow eyes appeared in every corner of the theater, especially the darkest ones. They were turned toward her. They bored into her back and made icy prickles go up and down her spine.
Bianca forced herself to put one foot in front of the other without giving in to the temptation of looking over her shoulder. Her heart pounded against her chest with such violence that everyone in the theater must be able to hear it.