Then again, the sensible thing to do might be simply to go back to his apartment and do what he could to prepare for the chemistry exam. In all likelihood, Sarah had taken his advice. She had calmed herself down, maybe with a cup of herbal tea, and then gone to sleep, leaving him out here in the cold, feeling like a total idiot.
“Come on, Sarah!” he said, so softly he could barely hear himself above the whistle of the storm. He brought his face up close to the front door and whispered, “I guess I’ll be heading home now. If you need me, give me a—”
His voice broke off, and he staggered back down the stairs, fighting to keep his balance. The last step tripped him, and he went sprawling backwards into the snow. Horrified, he stared up at the apartment door, convinced that he had seen . . . something on the door.
No! he told himself—not on the door.
In
the door!
For a flickering second, just as he had brought his face up close to the cold metal, he was positive he had seen a pair of eyes wink open and look at him.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he muttered as he stood up and furiously brushed the snow off his butt. The steady blast of wind sent hard pellets of snow into his face. “I imagined that!” he muttered, shaking his head with astonishment. “I had to imagine that!”
Craning his neck forward, he stared through the hazy curtain of snow between him and the door, and finally saw the small, black circle of the security peep hole.
“Ahh—that’s all it was,” he said aloud, to bolster his courage.
But he couldn’t shake the unnerving sensation that was growing steadily stronger in his gut. The image of Marley’s ghost appearing to Scrooge as a door knocker rose darkly in his mind, tickling him with spikes of fear.
“Now she’s got me all worked up,” he said, trying to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice. “She’s got me seeing things.”
But what about Sarah? he wondered.
Why hasn’t she answered the door?
Even if the door buzzer isn’t working, she must have heard all the commotion he was making.
What if she had taken too many of those tranquilizers, and she was out cold . . . or maybe worse!
Maybe she was in a coma . . . or dead. . . .
—Like Karen!
Okay. So lots of college students decide that school or life or romance or whatever is too tough for them, and they decide to drop out. It’s just that not many students decide to drop out as permanently as Karen did when she discovered that her roommate had been sleeping with her boyfriend. And not many students have to find their roommate sitting splay-legged on the floor with her brains splashed all over the living room wall from a self-inflicted gunshot, the way Sarah found Karen. And what about the guilt either Sarah or Tom still felt—and would always feel? Well, Tom figured that was just something they would both have to deal with on their own!
But what if, now,
Sarah
has done something . . . ?
A brilliant bolt of fear lanced through Tom. Taking the steps two at a time, he ran back up to the door and slammed his gloved fist against the metal as hard as he could. Pain spiked up his elbow to his shoulder, but he continued to rain heavy blows against the door. He was in such a frenzy that he hardly noticed it when the doorknob clicked, and the door started to swing inward.
“Oh, shit! Oh shit!” he muttered when he realized that the dark opening in front of him was gradually widening. Sucking in a sharp breath, he reached into the dark room and fumbled until he found the light switch. When he clicked it on, the sudden blast of light stung his eyes like a splash of salt water. Just then a fitful gust of wind seemed almost to push him into the entryway. His feet clumped heavily on the floor, knocking snow onto the rug where it began to melt.
“Hello . . .” he called out tentatively, craning his neck forward. “Sarah . . . ? It’s me, Tom.”
Only the entryway light—the one he had switched on—was on. In the back of his mind, he could still hear Sarah’s high-pitched voice repeating. . . .
“
—I’ve got every light in the apartment on. . . .
”
“Big deal! So she’s turned them off and gone to bed,” Tom told himself as he stood shivering in the entryway.
He knew what he should do is tiptoe out of here, go back to his apartment, get some sleep before the test, and forget all about what he had been thinking
might
have happened. He had enough problems of his own.
But he couldn’t do that, so, slipping off his gloves and unmindful of the mess the melting snow from his boots made on the floor, he made his way down the hallway toward Sarah’s bedroom. Even without turning on any more lights, he could see that her door was closed. Staring at the flat wooden door, he couldn’t help but wonder if, even now, hidden by the darkness, eyes were forming in the pattern of the wood and were watching him with a cold, steady, unblinking stare.
He hesitated in the hallway, wanting more than anything in the world just to turn around and leave, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that until he checked Sarah’s bedroom and made sure she was safe, asleep in bed before he left.
Stepping up to the closed door, he felt his hand trembling as he reached for the doorknob and turned it slowly. The worn brass sent a chill up his wrist. Then the latch clicked, and the door swung inward.
The snow-hazed light from the streetlight outside Sarah’s window did little to cut the darkness, but Tom could see that there was no one in Sarah’s bed. His hand found the wall switch and clicked it on. Rumpled sheets and twisted blankets were thrown about onto the floor. There was a depression in the middle of the bed, as though someone had been lying down recently, but Sarah was gone. Tom’s body tensed as he stepped cautiously into the room and looked around.
Okay, he told himself. So Sarah wasn’t here.
Maybe after he had made it clear that he wasn’t coming over, she had phoned some other friend and gone over there for the night.
If she was as freaked out as she had sounded over the phone, he couldn’t very well expect her to spend the night alone in the apartment, could he?
But if she had left, why hadn’t he seen her footprints in the snow by the door?
“Hey, Sarah?” he called out.
His nostrils flared as he walked over toward the bed, sniffing the stale air. There was an odd aroma in the room that he couldn’t quite identify. It had almost a metallic tinge to it. Bending over the bed, he ran his hand over the sheets, trying to feel any trace of residual body heat.
Nothing.
The bed was cold.
Tom straightened up, thoroughly confused. Sarah had called him less than an hour ago, and she had said she was sitting on her bed. Wouldn’t the sheets still be warm?
And what was that smell?
As he stood there, staring blankly at Sarah’s empty bed, another sensation intruded upon him. The hairs on the nape of his neck began to stir, and he had the undeniable sensation that
someone
was behind him, watching him.
A cold, sour knot tightened in his stomach. He started turning around, trying like hell to convince himself that it was Sarah, just returning from the bathroom and wondering who the hell this was in her bedroom, leaning over her bed.
“Hey, Sarah. I decided that I’d—”
His throat closed off, holding back the shout of surprise when he saw two glowing eyes staring at him from the closet door. His heart gave a quick, cold thump in his chest as he watched the eyes, hovering in the darkness.
“Jesus H.—” Tom muttered.
He took an involuntary step backwards and knocked into the night stand. Something fell to the floor and shattered.
He tried furiously to convince himself that this was just an illusion produced by the streetlight outside the window—the same trick of light that had fooled Sarah into thinking she was seeing eyes on the door.
Maybe it was just a shadow cast from the dirty window or something, but whatever it was, he didn’t dare take his eyes off it.
—That’s all it is—a shadow . . . an illusion!
With effort he calmed himself and studied the two circles that peered at him from inside the woodgrain pattern.
Yes, if he let his imagination stretch just a bit further, he could see where someone might find the suggestion of a face surrounding those cold, unblinking eyes. He could almost see a nose forming between the eyes, and just below that, there was a faint wisp of a mouth.
But that’s all it is, he told himself, just an illusion produced by the grain of the wood.
Keeping his eyes on the closet door, and taking short steps so he wouldn’t trip on anything, Tom made his way slowly over to it, being careful not to look away even for a second. He figured the image would disappear the closer he got, but even when he was within arm’s reach of the door, the illusion of eyes staring at him remained.
Slowly, he raised his hand, intending to touch the back of the door, but when his fingers were inches from the wood, the image of the face suddenly intensified.
Startled, Tom quickly withdrew his hand, and even as he did, the features of the face seemed for just an instant to solidify and become three-dimensional, bulging out of the wood at him.
In a flash, he realized that the face he was looking at did in fact look like
Karen’s
face. And the eyes staring at him with a frozen, unblinking rage were
Karen’s
eyes!
With a strangled cry in his throat, Tom turned and started to run; but before he could take more than two or three steps, a black curtain came down over his mind, and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.
-3-
C
onsciousness returned with an audible, gray rush.
Tom jolted up off the floor and, for a confused moment, stood there, staring numbly around Sarah’s apartment. Pale morning light filtered through the grimy window as the last vestiges of the storm sputtered thick flakes of snow from the rushing gray clouds.
Tom’s gaze immediately flashed to the closet door where he expected to see those eyes—
Karen’s
eyes—still staring unblinkingly at him. He was even mentally prepared to see the facial features more clearly defined in the clear morning light . . . maybe even projecting three-dimensionally out of the wood like they seemed to last night, so he felt an immense measure of relief when he saw nothing more than the swirling woodgrain pattern of the door.
Nothing else!
No eyes!
No face!
Nothing at all!
“For Christ’s fucking sake!” Tom mumbled as he rubbed his face with the flats of his hands. He flushed with embarrassment for having . . . what?
Had he actually passed out from fright?
Had Sarah’s frantic phone call gotten him so worked up that he had actually fainted?
A quick glance at his wristwatch showed him that it was almost six o’clock in the morning. He groaned aloud, thinking that the chemistry exam was less than three hours away. He was going to flunk out, so he might just as well go back to his apartment and start packing as he worked up some excuses for his father.
But as he walked out into the hallway, he realized that Sarah still wasn’t home—not unless she was asleep on the living room couch, oblivious to everything that had happened.
“Sarah?” he called out, craning his neck as he looked down the hallway first toward the living room, then toward the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed, but he thought he heard a noise from down there. Suddenly, he sniffed loudly as his nose caught a whiff of that strange aroma he had noticed when he had first entered the apartment last night. It was sharper, now; a stringent, metallic odor. He started down the hallway toward the bathroom.
Black fear coiled in his stomach as the sound he had noticed got steadily louder. It was definitely coming from the bathroom—a deep-throated
glug-glug
sound.
“Are you in there Sarah?” he whispered as he approached the closed door.
Fighting back the fear that the woodgrain on this door would suddenly resolve into a pair of unblinking eyes, he rapped on the wood twice, then twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open.
When he saw Sarah, sitting in the bathtub, her head thrown back, her mouth gaping open, and her eyes wide and staring sightlessly at the ceiling, every muscle in his body instantly unraveled. He fell to the floor on his knees and vomited into his lap. He was unable to take his eyes away from the pale, slender, naked arm that was hanging over the edge of the tub, its fingers dangling in a thick puddle of crusted blood.
Then he started to scream.
-4-
“I’m all right, Dad. . . . Honest, I am.”
Tom spoke softly as he stared straight into his father’s eyes through the bars of the jail’s holding cell.
Tom’s father, Dwight, shook his head with disgust. Unable to maintain eye contact with his son, he stared down at the tips of his shoes. One foot was tap-tapping on the cold cement floor. The floor was painted the same dull green as the walls. The color reminded Dwight of the bottom of a long-unkept swimming pool.