I blinked—and suddenly my surroundings came back to me. I was in church. In the pew, standing next to my brother with the hymnal in my hands. The high gray walls whooshed back into my consciousness. So did the colored banners and the tall windows with the sun pouring through. The people stood on every side of me, their voices rising as they sang the hymn:
O young and fearless Prophet of ancient Galilee,
Thy life is still a summons to serve humanity . . .
But all I could think was: I gotta get out of here!
I had to get back to that road, back to the place where I’d seen the tree and the lake—the tarn—that Jennifer had told me about. It wasn’t in her hallway. It wasn’t in her mind. It was just outside of town. And it was real.
“Something terrible is going to happen. Sunday.”
Today. Now.
I tried to think. What should I do? Was there someone I could tell? My brother? The police? Was there someone to whom I could give a warning?
But what warning? What would I tell them? That a crazy girl had seen demons in her hallway? That she was running around town afraid her doctors would take her brain out? Oh yeah, and by the way, she made a prophecy that might come true . . .
“Something terrible . . .”
I knew no one would believe me if I told them any of that. No one would believe that Jennifer had seen anything but a schizophrenic hallucination. Even I didn’t believe it. Not really. I just felt a need—an urgent need—to get out of there, to get to the road where I’d seen the tree and the tarn and find out . . . what was going to happen next.
It would be nothing, I told myself. Of course. It was all just some silly coincidence. Jennifer had seen the oak and the lake and they had gotten tangled up in her hallucinations, that’s all—the way my thoughts and worries had gotten tangled up in my dreams.
But now another memory came back to me. I remembered when I saw Jennifer in the woods—that day I was biking home from the barn, that day I got into the fight with Jeff. I remember I asked her what she was doing there.
“I’m looking for the devil,” she said to me.
I didn’t know what it meant then. Really, I didn’t know what it meant now. I just knew that when I remembered it, my throat went dry. My feeling of urgency increased. I had to get out of there. I had to go to the lake . . .
Now the hymn was ending. Now Mary was carrying the Bible down the aisle in order to read from one of the four Gospels. She came to a stop right next to me. She opened the book and started reading.
“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany . . .”
She always read the Gospel passage in an especially loud, trumpeting sort of voice. It practically rang in my ears.
“There they gave a dinner for him . . .”
I couldn’t leave the church now. I couldn’t just push past Mary in the middle of the Gospel reading and take off up the aisle. I swallowed hard—or tried to. Now the reading was over. Mary was marching back up the aisle toward the altar. Taking her place behind the high pulpit to deliver her sermon. What could I do? I couldn’t walk out on her sermon either. Not for this. Not because I happened to remember a tree that looked like the tree in Jennifer’s visions . . .
“Something terrible is going to happen.”
“Something terrible is going to happen,” said Mary from the pulpit.
“What?” I said, astounded that Mary’s ringing voice had echoed Jennifer, had echoed my thoughts.
People in the pews looked back to see who had spoken. My brother whispered, “Keep it down, dumbo.”
I stared up at him in stupid silence. I turned back to Mary and stared up at her.
“Jesus knows this,” Mary went on, “and that’s why he speaks as he does in the Gospel today . . .”
I felt like I was in a dream. Mary’s words were just part of her sermon. But still, they echoed my thoughts, they echoed Jennifer’s prediction, and they struck me as a message, a sign of some sort.
Was I crazy too? Or was someone trying to tell me something?
I really had to get out of here. I had to get to the tree, to the tarn.
The sermon seemed to go on forever. I couldn’t listen to it. I couldn’t think of anything except Jennifer’s desperate voice:
“Something terrible . . .”
Finally, Mary was finished. She leaned into the pulpit microphone. She said a heartfelt “Amen.”
“I gotta go,” I said to John.
I guess John must’ve thought I was slipping out to use the bathroom. He didn’t say anything as I ducked into the aisle and hurried to the back door—and out.
It was a cold day. A strong wind was blowing. Gray clouds moved quickly over a bright blue sky, dragging their shadows across the ground. I felt the force of the wind in my hair and against my cheek as I pushed my aching legs and ran top-speed over the green church lawn to my house—then around the side of the house to the port where I kept my bike.
Moments later I was pedaling as hard as I could through a powerful headwind. Glad to feel my body finally working better, healing. Making my way to the edge of town, down the country lane, to the base of the hill where the broken road led up into the countryside.
I felt strange and guilty being out on the road at a time when I was usually in church. As I traveled I started to think that maybe I was being ridiculous. Maybe I was acting as crazy as Jennifer. Or maybe—maybe I felt so bad about standing around helplessly while the police carried Jennifer away last night that I’d invented this whole situation—this dream, this sense of urgency—to make myself feel better, to make myself feel like at least I was doing something to help her.
But it didn’t matter now. No matter what, I had to get to that tree. I had to get to the tarn. I had to see whether there was really a coffin there, whether there was really something terrible about to happen—and if so, whether or not I could stop it.
I reached the hill and started up the road. I hadn’t been there since Jeff Winger and his boys beat me up. And you know what? I wasn’t happy to be there now. I was afraid I might run into Jeff—or Harry Mac or Ed P. What would happen if they saw me in the middle of nowhere like this without Jennifer’s brother, Mark, to protect me?
The wind pounded me as I pedaled hard up the long, winding incline, grunting with the effort. I scanned the scenery all around me. The rolling hills of grass. The stands of trees. Farmhouses and barns here and there—most of them standing empty and dark and abandoned.
I told myself I was going to feel awfully stupid once I saw that there was nothing to worry about. How was I going to explain to my brother why I had gone running out of church like that?
Then I saw it. Just as I remembered. A low oak stretching its branches out so far that it was wider than it was tall. And underneath it . . .
“A flat, black, round lake.”
A tarn, just as Jennifer had said.
I laid my bike down by the side of the road and started up the grassy slope on foot. I couldn’t run the whole way. I was too tired from pedaling. But I jogged as far as I could and then walked quickly, passing first through a thicket of trees and then into the open grasslands of the hill.
It was a weird scene out there. I was all alone. No one in sight anywhere as far as I could see. The sky looked huge and the clouds seemed to fly through it as if in a fast-motion film. The sun dimmed and grew bright again as the clouds passed. The grass bent in the wind, and the wind whispered through the trees behind me and rattled their bare branches. The whole place seemed somehow alive.
Up ahead, I could see the low oak bow and sway and rattle in the wind.
“It’s a demon tree.”
That’s what Jennifer had told me.
“The demons come out of the tarn and they gather there. They write evil symbols on the walls. And they put a coffin under the tree.”
I looked around over the empty hill. I didn’t see any demons. I didn’t see any coffin either. But I could see the lake now more clearly as I got closer. A small, round lake, as Jennifer had said—little more than a big puddle really. I could see its flat surface riffled by the wind, the little waves moving steadily across the surface, as if something were underneath the water, agitating the waves, rising, about to break through . . .
“They put a coffin under the tree. The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me. It had skeleton fingers.”
As I remembered Jennifer’s words—as I moved up the hill toward the tree and the lake—I started to get really nervous. I had this sense that something was behind me, following me, reaching for me from behind with its skeleton fingers . . .
I whipped around to check, still moving backward up the hill.
Nothing was there, of course. Just the empty slope. The waving grass. The waving trees at the bottom. The shadows passing over as the clouds raced by above.
Do right. Fear nothing.
I turned and ran up the slope.
I reached the oak at the crest. The wind pushed through it from behind, making its wide branches sway forward almost as if they would surround and take hold of me. I bent forward, my hands on my knees, my head down, trying to catch my breath after the climb. I looked into the riffling lake where the water rose and fell.
No demons in sight, that was for sure. No coffin. Nothing “terrible” seemed to be about to happen. I was just being silly. Following the visions of a schizophrenic. Following my dreams as if they were real. I was just trying to make myself feel better about the fact that there was nothing I could do to help Jennifer.
I straightened. And then I saw the old barn.
It had been hidden behind the oak, down the far slope of the hill, out of sight from below. I saw it now through the moving branches.
I stepped around the tree and peered down the slope. I felt something twist inside me as I got my first good look at the barn.
It was not a pleasant place to look at. It was old, empty, abandoned. The paint had long since worn away, and the boards were rotten and splintery. The barn’s door was closed, a wooden bolt holding it in place. But the wind made the door buck and knock as if someone—or something—were pushing on it from behind.
I looked around me. The emptiness of the hill seemed chaotic with the racing shadows of the clouds. It was an eerie, lonely place to be and I wanted to get out of there fast—now. I told myself: I’ve done my job. I’ve checked things out. Nothing terrible is happening. After all, Jennifer hadn’t mentioned the barn in her vision. Just the tree and the lake.
But even as I told myself to turn around and run back to my bike, I started moving down the far slope of the hill toward the barn.
Do right. Fear nothing.
The closer I got to the place, the spookier it looked. Big. Dark. Empty. And it seemed to expand and shudder with the wind. The door kept knocking against its bolt, straining against its hinges. The closer I got, the more I expected the door to burst open and something—Jennifer’s demons, maybe—to come rushing out at me.
I reached the barn. Again, I had that feeling that someone—something—was creeping up behind me. Again, I looked around. Again, I saw nothing.
I turned back to the door and put my hands on the bolt. Felt the door moving and straining against my hand like a living thing.
I lifted the bolt. I pulled the big door open. The barn yawned wide and dark in front of me.
There was the coffin.
I wasn’t nervous anymore. I was scared out of my wits. My stomach was in knots. I had to use all my willpower to keep from running away.
It’s not really a coffin, I told myself. It’s just a crate. It’s just an old crate in an empty barn.
And that was true. It wasn’t shaped like a coffin. It just looked like an old shipping crate or something.
But I couldn’t help noticing that it was just the right size to hold a body.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me. It had skeleton fingers.”
I ought to go, I told myself. I ought to get out of here, get some help. I ought to call the police.
But what would I tell the police if I called them? There’s an empty barn with a box in it? There’s a schizophrenic girl who says something terrible is going to happen? And I had a dream? And there are dreams in the Bible?
No. It would sound ridiculous. In spite of all my fears—in spite of my horror-movie imagination—nothing had really happened. Nothing terrible. Nothing at all.
The problem was, I still felt I couldn’t leave here before I was sure everything was all right.
So I stepped into the barn.
The daylight disappeared behind me. The barn’s shadows closed over me. The place was big and empty and the shadows were dark. I could vaguely make out piles of garbage—farm tools, lumber, auto parts, crates—lying against the wall. I couldn’t help feeling that there were things moving unseen amid those weirdly shaped piles—but I told myself it was just my imagination.
I stepped closer to the box in the center of the dirt floor.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me.”
I shook my head rapidly, hoping to get rid of Jennifer’s words.
But now, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw something else. Something on the walls. Writing. Slashed symbols. I turned and saw a picture of a grinning skull. A picture of a grinning devil. The word DEATH splashed in huge letters.
“The demons come out of the lake and they gather there. They write evil symbols on the walls.”
My breath caught and a sound came out of me—a sound I didn’t like to hear—a frightened whine that made me sound like a little boy scared of the monster under my bed, trying not to call for my mommy.
What was this place? What was that box? What was happening?
I really wanted to run. I wanted to run so badly it was almost like my legs were going to start moving without me. But I kept thinking of what Jennifer had said—had repeated over and over:
“Something terrible is going to happen. Sunday.”
Today. Now.
Do right! I screamed at myself in my mind. Do right and fear nothing, Sam!
If something terrible was going to happen—and if I was the only one who knew—and if I could do something to stop it—then I had to find out what was going on and do whatever I could.
I took another step toward the box.
And something inside it started to move.
I stopped dead-still. My mouth hung open. I thought I must be imagining things. But there was no way. No way I was imagining this. Clearly, from inside the box, came the sound of thumping. I even thought I saw the box tremble a little—as if something was twisting around in there.
And then . . . another noise . . . I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Then I was. It was a voice. Muffled. Straining to speak. A human voice.
This was no demon. Someone was in there! Someone was trapped in that box. Struggling to get out. Calling for help.
Do right!
I had forgotten all about the bruises and sore spots on my body now. I rushed forward. The box had a lid on top of it. The lid was just boards hammered together. There were ropes running through the spaces between the boards and the spaces in the crate. The ropes were knotted to hold the lid in place.
I knelt in front of the box and began to try to untie the knots as fast as I could. It wasn’t easy. My hands were shaking like crazy. I felt the shadows of the barn moving all around me. I felt the symbols on the wall watching me: the grinning death’s head, the grinning devil, the strange symbols, the slashed words . . . DEATH . . . I felt sure something was hiding behind the piles of garbage on the walls, watching me . . .
And all the while, from inside the box, the thumping noise continued, growing more rapid—more desperate, I thought. The muffled voice tried to call out, cracking in its strain. It sounded panicky and fearful.
I pulled frantically at the rope—and finally, finally, the knot came loose. I grabbed hold of the lid and shoved it off the box.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness now. I could see clearly what was inside—who was inside the box.
It was Harry Mac. Jeff Winger’s muscleman crony. The guy who had chased me onto the railroad bridge. The guy who had helped Jeff beat me silly down by the road. He was tied up with ropes. He was gagged with an old bandanna. His eyes were white with terror. His face was streaked with blood.
Struggling against the ropes that tied him, he cried out to me frantically from behind the gag. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew he was trying to scream for help.
I reached forward to pull down the gag, but before I could, I heard a noise behind me.
I turned and saw a silhouetted figure charging at me out of the shadows.
And suddenly, the wind rose. The barn door blew shut. Darkness.
The next second, something struck me—hard—on the side of the head, and I toppled over into a deeper darkness still.