First, the alarm woke me up. Then the police came. And I knew I was in more trouble than ever before.
I had not been home for very long. The journey back from the hospital had been slow and dangerous. Luckily, everyone had been so busy looking for me and Jennifer in the woods in back of the hospital, no one had found my bike in the woods out in front. I made my way to it quickly. With the glow of the police flashers visible from the nearby hospital driveway, I threw my leg over the saddle and started to pedal away down the two-lane.
It was slow going. The police were everywhere along the road. I had to listen for them—to listen for any traffic that might be them. Whenever I heard a motor approaching, I had to—quick—pull off into the woods, lay down my bike, and duck behind the trees until the gleaming white headlights went by and the red taillights faded into the darkness. Only when they were out of sight did I feel safe enough to take up my ride again.
It was nearly three in the morning by the time I got back to the rectory. As worked up as I was, I half expected to find the police waiting for me right there on the front lawn. Jennifer had promised not to tell them about me. But to be honest, I didn’t think she’d be able to keep that promise. She was so sick, so confused, I figured once they started questioning her, she’d probably tell them the name of her “magic friend” without even meaning to.
But it seemed I was wrong. It seemed Jennifer had been as good as her word. At least, there weren’t any cop cars waiting for me on the lawn when I got home. The lights were out in all the windows. Mom, Dad, my brother—no one even knew that I had gone.
I put my bike in the bike port and snuck inside as quietly as I could. Crept upstairs as quietly as I could. In my room I was dropping my clothes to the floor even as I staggered to the bed. I dropped onto the bed like a falling tree—plonk—face-first into the mattress. The last thought I had was:
“They’re real. The demons. They’re all real. You have to stop them.”
A second later, I was asleep.
A second after that—or at least it seemed like it was only a second—the radio alarm went off and music was banging through the room, banging in my ears. I don’t think I’d moved at all since losing consciousness. I barely moved now. My hand just reached out and hit the clock radio button to turn off the music. Then my hand fell and I just lay there, my face still plunked down into the mattress.
My thoughts picked up right where they’d left off the night before: “They’re real. The demons. They’re all real. You have to stop them.”
I didn’t know what to think when she said that—and I still didn’t know what to think. Were the demons real? Was that possible?
After all the trouble I’d gone through to get to Jennifer, I still didn’t really know the answer to that question. I’d been too busy worrying about the police to think about it much on the way home. And when I got home, I’d fallen asleep so fast I hadn’t had a chance to think about it at all.
Now, though, lying there in that half-sleep state, I did start thinking about it. I thought about all the stuff Jennifer had told me last night in the woods.
“I heard their whispers. In the night. In the dark. In my room. I heard their footsteps. And I followed them.”
It was the same old story, wasn’t it? The whispers in the night. The demons out in her hall. Just the same old hallucinations. Just like before.
“I followed them down the stairs and out the door. They went behind our house. They gathered there in the little shed. They whispered to each other.”
Slowly I rolled over onto my back. I fought off sleep. I forced my eyes wider. I lay there staring up at the ceiling.
Is it? I thought. Is it really the same old story?
I mean, the stuff that Jennifer told me last night—it could’ve happened, couldn’t it? If you left out the demon part, what she was telling me wasn’t really that crazy at all. Let’s say Jennifer was lying in her bed awake one night—well, she could’ve heard whispers out in the hall, couldn’t she? Footsteps. She could’ve peeked out and seen something. And okay, so it wasn’t demons, but it might’ve been . . .
I sat up. Oh, I was awake now. Yeah, I was wide awake.
Something had just occurred to me, something that had never occurred to me before. I thought back to what my dad had said when I asked him if Jennifer might be having visions of the future like one of the prophets in the Bible:
“The world is not a magical place. The things that happen are pretty predictable, and they can usually be explained in ordinary terms.”
I knew that was right. There’s always a practical explanation for the things that happen in the world.
But that doesn’t mean that’s the whole explanation, does it? That doesn’t mean that things happen with no reason or rhyme.
“Who did you see, Jennifer?”
I remembered asking her that in the woods.
“Who did you see?”
“Demons. They had to be. They had to be.”
But what if . . .? I thought.
When I considered it, it was pretty obvious that Jennifer really was suffering from some kind of mental illness, like everybody said. Schizophrenia—or something—whatever . . . It was obvious she really was having hallucinations. But what if she was having hallucinations about something that was also real? Something that was in her mind, say, that she didn’t want to think about, that she couldn’t bear to think about in any other way. What if Jennifer had forced all these unhappy thoughts down to the bottom of her mind, but when the schizophrenia gave her hallucinations, the hallucinations were full of the things she didn’t want to think about? That made sense. It wasn’t “magical.” It could really happen.
“I heard their whispers. In the night. In the dark. In my room. I heard their footsteps. And I followed them.”
Mark, I thought.
His name came into my mind without me even thinking about it. Mark Sales, Jennifer’s brother. I know, I know, it was ridiculous. Mark was a good guy, the track-star hero of the whole school, but who else could it have been? If Jennifer was asleep in her room . . . if she heard whispers in the hall . . . it either had to be her mom or Mark, didn’t it?
And if it was Mark—if it was Mark whispering and planning with his friends to do something wrong—then that was something Jennifer wouldn’t be able to think about. Because Mark was Jennifer’s hero. He was her protector. He always stood up for her whenever anyone teased her. If Jennifer found out something bad about him, something really bad, she might push it out of her mind . . . and with her being sick and all, it might come back to her in her hallucinations.
But Mark wouldn’t do anything that bad. Would he?
“I’m kind of off Mark . . .”
I remembered Zoe writing that when we were chatting online.
“He can be kind of arrogant.”
I remembered how shocked I was when she compared him to Jeff Winger.
And that made me think of Jeff . . .
“You think I’m scared of Mark? I’m sick of Mark. Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
Those were Jeff Winger’s words, weren’t they? I remembered he’d said them when he was bullying Jennifer that time—that time I stopped him—that time he and his goons beat me up.
“Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
What did he mean by that?
Now all these thoughts were tumbling through my mind at once. All these things I’d heard but hadn’t really paid attention to, hadn’t really understood.
“Harry Mac knew. He was going to tell the police. They decided to put him in a coffin. Under the tree. By the tarn. Send a warning to the others. Then they would be afraid.”
That’s what Jennifer told me last night.
And I thought she meant Jeff Winger and Ed P. had killed Harry Mac. I had asked her: “Was this Jeff Winger? Jeff and Ed P.? Are they the demons?”
And Jennifer answered: “They would be afraid.”
I heard a noise come out of me, a sort of long, low moan as the breath escaped me.
The person who murdered Harry Mac wasn’t Jeff. The murderer was trying to make Jeff afraid. That’s what she was saying.
“You think I’m scared of Mark? I’m sick of Mark. Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
The jumbled ideas in my mind started to untangle themselves. I thought: What if Jeff and Harry Mac and Ed P. knew something bad about Mark Sales? What if Mark had threatened Jeff, trying to get him to keep quiet . . .?
But then Mark found out that Harry Mac was acting as a police informer . . . So Mark killed Harry Mac to silence him—and to make sure Jeff and Ed P. really would be afraid of him from then on.
All right, all right, it sounded insane even to me. And it was all coming together so fast in my mind, I couldn’t really lay it out logically. But I understood—I was beginning to understand—how the things Jennifer saw might be hallucinations and sort of visions at the same time . . .
And how it all might have something to do with Mark . . .
That was when the police showed up.
I could hear the knock at the door from all the way upstairs. There was something about that knock—I recognized it immediately. Most people rang the rectory doorbell, and even when they knocked, they didn’t knock like that. I knew from the pounding, urgent sound of it that it had to be the police.
I jumped out of bed. Rushed to the window. Opened it. Stuck my head out into the bright, cold morning. I could just see around the edge of the house, and sure enough, the tail end of a police cruiser was visible, parked at the curb.
I pulled my head in. I swallowed hard. I tried to think. What should I do? What should I do?
Jennifer must have told them what happened at the hospital. She probably tried to keep it a secret but was too confused to hold out for long. So now they were going to take me back to the police station, question me, maybe arrest me.
And meanwhile, something terrible was coming. “So many dead.” Today. Any minute. It was all real.
I heard the knock at the door again.
I heard my mother sing out, “Coming! Coming!”
I rushed to the dresser. Started pulling out clothes and stuffing myself into them just as fast as I could.
I had just got my sneakers on when I heard my mother calling, “Sam! Could you come down here for a minute, please?”
I froze. Just stood there in the middle of the room. All these thoughts were racing through my head and I just couldn’t figure out what to do. Detective Sims told my father that if he saw me again, he was going to arrest me for being part of Jeff Winger’s gang. Would he believe me if I explained to him about Jennifer’s “vision”? If I told him my suspicions about Mark Sales, would he investigate?
I thought about Detective Sims. His round, snowman’s face, his unwavering quirky smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. I seriously didn’t think he would believe a single word I said.
I didn’t think anyone would. Not without proof. Not fast enough. Not in time.
Jennifer wasn’t having visions. Her hallucinations were telling her what she knew but didn’t want to know. Her brother had murdered Harry Mac. Her brother was planning something terrible that he was going to do today. Nobody knew or understood any of this except for me.
No one could stop it—except for me.
“Sam!” my mother called from downstairs. “Sam, do you hear me? Could you come down here, please? Detective Sims is here and he wants to speak with you right now.”
I still didn’t answer. It would probably be only a few more seconds before she—or my dad or my brother—came to get me.
So I grabbed my jacket and raced to the window.
The rainspout. There I was again, wrapped around it, shimmying down. Down to the grass alley beside my house. No point trying to get out the front way—not with the police parked right there. So I took off for the back, climbed over the fence, and was in the backyard of my dad’s church.
Then I kept going, past the church, to the road.
I was on the run again.