Suddenly the phone went silent.
“Hello?” I shouted. “Hello?”
But there was no answer, nothing. Jennifer had hung up. She was gone.
I lowered my cell from my ear and stared into space. I thought: So many dead. Tomorrow. So many dead.
Something on my computer caught my eye.
JOE: Sam? U still there?
I hesitated for only a second, then I typed in quickly:
ME: G2G.
And I dashed out of the room.
“Dad! Dad!” I shouted.
I plunged down the stairs two at a time, so fast I nearly tripped and fell headlong to the bottom. My feet skittered over the floor as I came off the last step. I had to grab hold of the banister post to keep from falling.
“Dad! Da—”
“Whoa, Sam. What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
Dad was there, right in front of me. He took hold of my shoulders to keep me from going down.
“Jennifer called me,” I said to him. I could barely get the words out, they were jumbling together in my mind and in my mouth. “Jennifer . . . she . . . on the phone . . .”
“All right, all right, slow down. Tell me what happened.”
My father—so much taller than I was—blinked down at me through his glasses from high above. My mom had also come into the room at the sound of my shouts and she was standing behind him. John was at the top of the stairs now, looking down. They were all watching me, waiting to hear what I was about to say.
I took a breath, trying to slow down my racing brain so I could get the words right. “Jennifer called me on my cell.”
“From the hospital?” said my father.
“I guess. Yes. I don’t know. Yes, probably. She said she’d had another . . . another vision.”
My father straightened a little in surprise. He was still holding on to my shoulders. “A vision. What do you mean?”
“She said, ‘So many dead. So many dead.’ She kept saying it. She said it was going to happen tomorrow.”
I don’t know what I expected to happen next. I guess I thought my dad would leap to the phone and call the police or something. But instead of getting more excited—as excited as I was—he seemed to sort of relax. He let go of me. He put his hands in his pockets. His mouth kind of bunched up all on one side.
“Look, Sam,” he said, “we talked about this. Jennifer is a very sick girl. She has hallucinations . . .”
“I know, but . . .”
“She’s not a prophet, Sam. She’s not seeing into the future. That’s not the way things work. It doesn’t make sense.”
“But last time her hallucinations came true.”
“Her hallucinations didn’t come true . . .”
“Harry Mac . . .,” I started to say.
“Harry Mac was killed by his fellow criminals after he informed on them to the police. That had nothing to do with demons or coffins or prophecies. It was just a crime.”
“But Jennifer saw it! She saw it was going to happen!”
My father smiled kind of painfully. He glanced over his shoulder at my mother. She sort of shrugged.
“She didn’t see Harry Mac get murdered, Sam,” Dad explained patiently. “You know she didn’t. What she saw was some demons and a coffin and all kinds of crazy stuff: a hallucination. I admit that somehow that made you think of the place where Harry was killed. But that doesn’t mean . . .”
“But it couldn’t have been a coincidence!”
“On the contrary,” Dad said. “I think it was obviously some sort of coincidence. I don’t think there can be any other explanation. And anyway, the people who are responsible are in jail. They’re not going to hurt anyone else.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. I couldn’t believe my dad was saying it. I stared at him with my mouth open. Why couldn’t he see what was happening? Jennifer had had a vision—a vision of death coming tomorrow—“so many dead.” It was going to come true just like the other one. I knew it. I was absolutely sure.
Someone had to find out what it meant. Someone had to stop it from happening.
“Dad . . .,” I started.
“Sam,” he said, “what is it exactly you want me to do?”
“Well . . . shouldn’t we maybe call Detective Sims at least? Shouldn’t we tell him what Jennifer said?”
“I don’t think we should bother the detective,” my mother said quickly, a worried look on her face. “He almost charged you with murder, Sam. We should stay away from him as much as we can. We don’t need any more trouble today.”
But my dad, after a minute’s thought, said, “No, I think that’s fair. I think Detective Sims would want to know about this. I’ll call him in the morning.”
“In the morning?” I nearly shouted. “We only have till tomorrow!”
“Well, Detective Sims has probably gone home for the night . . .”
“Well, can’t you call 911?”
“I’m not going to call 911 to report a hallucination,” Dad said, starting to sound impatient. But then I could see him think the whole thing over some more. And he said, “But I’ll call the department now and tell whoever’s there.”
My mom and I stood in the living room and listened while my dad called the police. We heard him ask for Sims. Then we heard him say, “Well, is there some other detective on duty?” After a wait, I guess someone came on, because my dad explained it to them: exactly what I’d told him about the phone call and what Jennifer said. He spoke in his usual quiet, reasonable voice. He didn’t sound panicked or even concerned. He just sounded like he thought it was something they ought to know.
Finally, he hung up.
The minute he did, I asked him: “What did they say? What did they say?”
“It was another detective. Brody. He said he would tell Detective Sims about it in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“He didn’t sound very concerned.”
“But Jennifer said . . .”
“I know, I know what she said, Sam. But this Detective Brody was familiar with Jennifer’s case. He says the doctors are now fairly certain she’s suffering from schizophrenia. He says it’s unlikely anything she says has any relation to reality. And frankly, Sam, I have to agree with him.”
“But she knew about Harry Mac!” I insisted.
This time my father only looked at me without saying anything. He didn’t have to say anything. I could read what he was thinking right there on his face. He didn’t believe for a second that Jennifer was having visions of real things that would really happen. He thought it was just madness. Schizophrenia.
“Don’t worry, all right?” he said. “The police are on it, and they’ll take care of it in the morning.”
But I did worry. I worried a lot. In fact, for the next couple of hours, that’s pretty much all I did: worry. I went back up to my room. I paced around. I lay down on my bed. I stared up at the ceiling. I got up and paced around some more. The whole time, all I could think about was Jennifer—Jennifer whispering. I could hear her, almost as if she were standing right there next to me.
“So many dead. Tomorrow. So many dead.”
My dad hadn’t heard that. He hadn’t heard the fear in her voice. I had. And I couldn’t stop hearing it. Jennifer’s words brought all these pictures into my head. Pictures of dead people lying all over the place. Bodies. Blood. And okay, some of these pictures, I guess, were from horror movies I’d seen on TV, but all the same, they were pretty realistic looking. And the more I thought about them—the more I paced back and forth—the more I remembered Jennifer whispering over the phone—well, the more realistic these pictures started to seem.
It was after ten o’clock now. I heard my parents come slowly upstairs. I head their voices on the landing.
“What a week,” my father said heavily.
“Joy comes in the morning,” said my mother, which was something she always said when someone was having a hard time.
“I sure hope so,” said my father. “Because, really—what a terrible week.”
Then I heard their bedroom door close and their voices became muffled and were finally silent. The house was quiet around me. I felt alone. Really alone. Like maybe I was the last person left in the world.
And I was scared too. More scared, I think, than I had ever been in my life. Because somehow I had managed to convince myself completely that Jennifer was telling the truth. I felt absolutely sure that the bodies and the death she had seen were real, real things that were really going to happen in the future. Tomorrow. I felt sure that Jennifer was having visions like the prophets in the Bible did.
The dead—so many dead—tomorrow.
Somehow this disaster already seemed real to me. There was not a doubt in my mind that it was going to happen. You have to understand that. You have to—because that’s the only way you’ll be able to understand what I did next.