Don't Look Behind You Part 7

Still, she managed to ask calmly, "What's that about a briar patch?"

"It's from one of the old Disney movies," I told her. "Brer Rabbit wants to escape from his enemy, the fox. He knows that whatever he asks, Brer Fox will do the opposite, so he tells him-"

"You don't have to recite the story of Uncle Remus to me," said Lorelei. "I was reading it to your mother forty years ago. Why did you want that man to shut us in a closet?"166.

"Because the closets in this house have escape hatches," I said, pointing at the ceiling directly above us, where a rectangular piece of plywood was set into the plaster."I see," she murmured thoughtfully. "A trapdoor to the attic. But what possible good will it do us for you to climb up there? Won't that be exchanging one prison for another?""There's a door in the closet in Bram's room too," I told her. "He and his friends climb up and use the attic for a hideout. If I can get across and climb down into his room, I may be able to escape from the house and get help.""Are you going to be able to get up there?" Lorelei asked doubtfully. "There's nothing in the closet you can use for a stepladder, and with my arm like it is, I can't even give you a boost.""That won't be a problem," I said. "Getting up will be easy. The part I'm worried about is getting back down."I made a hasty survey of the contents of the closet. As Lorelei said, it contained nothing but clothing, but the clothes bar was firmly attached to supports behind the walls and appeared to be st.u.r.dy enough to bear my weight. Taking a pair of Dad's trousers down from their hanger, I slung them across the bar so they straddled it with one of the legs hanging down on either side. Then I knotted the cuffs together to form a loop and inserted my foot as though I were mounting a horse. Catching hold of the edge of the shelf at the top of the closet, I straightened until I was standing upright in the stirrup with my shoulders braced against the trapdoor above me. When I shoved against the part.i.tion, it lifted easily, and within minutes I had hauled myself up into the attic.Heat and dampness poured over me like a tidal wave, along with the pungent odors of bananas and peanut b.u.t.ter. The open trapdoor allowed enough light to filter up from the closet so I could see for several feet, but beyond that limited area there was absolute blackness.

167.Lorelei called up to me softly, "Is everything all right?"

"There's not as much room as I'd hoped there would be," I told her. "I thought it would be a full attic that you could stand up in, but at this end, at least, it's not much more than a crawl s.p.a.ce. I can't understand why those boys like to play up here. It's like a real-life setting for Dungeons and Dragons."

I stared into the darkness, trying to get oriented. I knew the general direction of Jason's room, but without any landmarks to guide me, it was hard to gauge distance. To make matters worse, the floor wasn't boarded over, but was composed of narrow beams connected by sheets of plywood so flimsy I was afraid to put my weight on them. It was hard to imagine how my brother and his friends had managed to play there without cras.h.i.+ng down through the ceiling to land on top of us.

I drew a deep breath and, praying I could keep from falling, began to inch my way along the network of planking on my hands and knees. My chief concern was to move as silently as possible. I tried to visualize the pattern of the rooms beneath me-my parents' bedroom, the hallway, the bathroom, and Jason's room. Where in the house would Vamp be now? I asked myself, and decided he was probably in the living room, since from there he would be able to watch from the window and see the lights of a car pulling into the driveway.

The roof peaked at the center of the attic, allowing me enough head s.p.a.ce so I could stand up and walk. That proved harder than crawling, however, since I had to bend double at the waist, which made it almost impossible to keep my balance on the beams. Regretfully, I returned to my hands and knees and continued on in that manner until I felt the ceiling brush the top of my head at the exact same angle it had above my parents' closet. Since Jason's room was the mirror image of theirs, I could only a.s.sume his closet lay just ahead of me.168.

I crawled on for several more feet but couldn't find the door. I ran my hands across the plywood sheeting between the support planks, but found neither cracks nor any indication of a handle. What I did come in contact with was an open-face peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich that stuck to my hand as though it were spread with glue, and next to that, a bunch of overripe bananas and a cellophane sack that had evidently once contained cookies.The fact that I'd come upon Jason's stash of food supplies gave me hope that I was not too far from the door. I continued to fumble around in all directions, but all I had to show for my efforts were splinters. Then my knuckles b.u.mped against something metallic. I slid my hand across the cylindrical object, and my heart gave a leap as my thumb encountered a b.u.t.ton. It was like being handed an unexpected present. My brother had left me the best gift of all, a flashlight.I pressed the switch, and the world jumped into place. The trap door I was searching for was diagonally across from me, just far enough away so I hadn't been able to locate it. A nail had been driven partway into it to form a handle, and when I gripped it and pulled, the door swung easily upward. Although Jason's closet light wasn't on, the rectangular opening was illuminated by a faint yellow glow, and when I leaned over to peer down into it, I saw that both the closet and bedroom doors were open and the darkness was being diluted by light from the hall.Perched on the beam that ran parallel to the opening, I let my legs dangle down into the s.p.a.ce below me. Then, lowering myself until I was partially supported by the clothes bar, I allowed myself to drop the rest of the way to the floor.Because I was wearing tennis shoes, I landed softly, like a cat dropping out of a tree onto a cus.h.i.+on of gra.s.s. When I emerged from the closet into my brother's room, my first choice would have been to escape through the window, but 169.Jason's window was as small as the one in my room, and even he could not have squeezed through it.

That left me no alternative but to leave by a door. If, as I supposed, Mike Vamp had positioned himself by the window at the front of the house, the only escape route left to me was through the kitchen. Turning off the flashlight, but still gripping it tightly, I crept across the room to the doorway and stood there listening for sounds from the living room. When I didn't hear any, I thrust a tentative foot out into the hall and paused again, made more nervous than ever by the oppressive silence. Cautiously I eased my way into the hall, hating the thought of being so exposed and vulnerable. A floorboard creaked, and I almost jumped through the ceiling, but to my relief there was still no response from the living room. It was as though I were being granted some special dispensation that permitted me to move through the house unnoticed.

Creeping down the hall, I slipped into the kitchen. The overhead light was still on, and on the floor at the base of the counter lay the telephone I had dropped when I'd seen the face at the window. The receiver was off the hook and beeping urgently like a small, dependent child torn away from its mother. The sound seemed to bounce off the walls and echo through the house. It was hard to imagine how anyone could ignore it.

When I crossed the room to the back door, I was momentarily disconcerted to find that it was no longer locked, but I didn't give myself time to absorb the significance of that fact. The exciting knowledge that freedom was that close was so intoxicating it dulled my ability to reason. Lulled into a sense of security by my luck so far, I yanked open the door and stepped out into the yard.

At some point since our arrival, the rain had stopped. Like most Florida storms, this one had ended abruptly, leaving in its wake a calm, wet world, filled with the song of frogs cavorting in puddles and the high-pitched sawing of170.

crickets hidden in the underbrush. High in the sky a thin, bleached moon peeped shyly out through a hole in the clouds, slimmer than it had been the night of Amy's party and guarded on either side by an entourage of stars.I was halfway down the steps when Porky started barking. My first reaction was to wonder what could have triggered him. If he hadn't heard me drop down into Jason's closet, it seemed strange that he would react to my slipping from the house. It took me a moment to realize he wasn't inside and the barking was coming, instead, from the yard to my left. An instant later, I saw a pale blur streaking toward me, yipping in delight at the momentous discovery that I was no longer sealed away in a closet but was now available to join in a game of tag.Which was just what it must have seemed when I started running. Even before I heard Mike Vamp behind me, I was racing across the yard and around the corner of the porch. No wonder I hadn't been detected when I crept down the hall! No wonder the house had seemed so improbably quiet! I hadn't been heard, because there had been no one to hear me. Vamp had not been waiting for my parents in the living room; instead, he had been lying in wait for them in the yard.At the end of the drive, Lorelei's car lights seemed to beckon to me. In my rush to rea.s.sure myself that the car in the ditch was unoccupied, I had neglected to turn off the headlights of the Porsche, and they now blazed forth like twin beacons in a low-set lighthouse. With those to guide me, I increased my speed as I ran, terribly conscious of the pounding footsteps behind me. I had in my favor the fact that I knew the terrain, the location of all the shrubbery, trees, and potholes. I easily skirted the bushes that lined the driveway and could tell by his curses that my pursuer had collided with them. Porky was still barking gleefully as he scampered along behind me, having a fine old time. Then I heard a yelp and a thud and another burst of swearing and 171.realized that Vamp had stumbled over the dog, giving me a chance to increase the distance between us.

I reached the car, hurled myself into it, and slammed the door, punching the lock a split second before Vamp's hand struck the handle. I reached frantically down to see if the key was in the ignition. To my relief, it was, and I gave it a savage twist, rewarded by a guttural rumble of protest. I tried again, and this time was greeted by silence. Even to someone who knew as little about cars as I did, it was obvious that the lights had run down the battery.

The muzzle of a pistol was now pressed to the window.

"Unlock that door and get out of the car," Vamp shouted, his gentlemanly facade a thing of the past. "Your father's the one I want, not you or your grandmother. When my job here is done, the rest of the family can go."

He made it sound so inevitable-"when my job here is done"-as though my father's murder were a foregone conclusion. Staring out through the window into the face of death, I wondered if those strange eyes had ever held light, even when they belonged to a newborn baby. Jim had been right when he'd said happy endings weren't mandatory. This was no TV drama, it was hard-core reality. I had been the creator of this true-life drama, and I was the one responsible for its ending.

What I did next wasn't planned, it simply happened. Without s.h.i.+fting my gaze from Vamp's, I slid my right arm between the bucket seats and groped until my hand closed upon the handle of my tennis racket. Then I switched off the headlights, and the yard went black. The thin slip of moon was once again shrouded in clouds, and the lighted front window of the house was s.h.i.+elded by bushes.

With my left hand I picked up the flashlight, my thumb on the switch.

"You win," I said. "I'll get out," and I opened the door.

If I'd had more time to think, I might not have done it. I'd been raised by parents who never had lifted a hand to172.

me, and my only exposure to violence had been from movies. To keep myself from panicking, I blocked out the present and pictured myself on a tennis court in the early morning with c.o.c.ky, self-a.s.sured Larry standing across from me. "You're pretty good for a girl!" I heard him call tauntingly, and I willed myself to respond with exaggerated anger.Sliding out of the car, I turned on the flashlight and directed the beam into the startled eyes of the hitman. The sudden, blinding glare caught him unawares, and I didn't pause to find out how he was going to react to it. With my right hand gripping the racket handle and my legs widespread for balance, I swung my serving arm up and over my head. I told myself the pale oval was a tennis ball and this was the serve that was going to decide the match. It seemed as though I was moving very slowly, but actually it all happened in a matter of seconds. With my arm stretched high in the air, I turned the racket on edge and brought it slicing down with all my strength directly into the face of the man in front of me.The blow landed so hard that the racket flew out of my hand, and the hitman went staggering back to the edge of the ditch. For a moment he teetered there like a circus performer gone out of control on a highwire, spotlighted by the cruel white beam of the flashlight. Then his eyes rolled back and his legs crumbled under him, and as I stood there motionless, paralyzed with horror, he went plunging backward over the edge of the embankment.The soul-chilling sound of the splash snapped me back into motion. With a few swift strides I was at the edge of the drainage ditch, staring down into what was now a fast-flowing river. The beam of the flashlight played across the surface, but there was no sign of either a man or a vampire. The hitman was gone, as though he had never existed.And perhaps he hadn't, I thought. Had he ever been real? Perhaps he was just a figment of a fever dream. Perhaps I would wake in the morning in Princess April's Chamber 173.and smile at the silly nightmare that had seemed so real to me. But even as I tried to make myself believe that, I was sliding down the embankment into the ditch, preparing to undertake the most gruesome search of my life.

I walked that portion of ditch at least three dozen times that night, feeling around with my feet for what I didn't want to find. When I was finally able to concede it was hopeless, I didn't have enough strength left to climb back out again. I don't know how long I stood there in water up to my rib cage, fighting the pull of the current and waiting for morning. It might have been hours, it might have been only minutes, but that was where it was that my family found me when Tom Geist drove the three of them home from the hospital.

It was my father who climbed into the ditch to get me, and carried me in his arms back up to the house. Tom remained to continue the search for the body, which he found wedged between the front wheels of the Plymouth and the culvert. Then, as the sky in the east began to grow light and the branches of the trees filled with riotous birdsong, we gathered in our living room to compose the final chapter of the Weber family story.

"You'll have to admit it's ironic," Lorelei said wryly. "We finally have something in common, and it has to be this."

"Our situations aren't comparable," said Mother. "You didn't bring your injury on yourself. When Larry told me Valerie wasn't at Kim's house, I was so upset I just had to rush right over there, even though I knew I shouldn't be driving."

They were seated side by side in dilapidated armchairs, weighed down by identical casts on their right arms. I was scrunched up on the sofa with my feet in my father's lap and a blanket wrapped around me, for despite the heat of the room I was s.h.i.+vering uncontrollably. Jason lay sprawled on the floor with his head on Porky's haunches, and Tom174.

175.Geist stood by the door, regarding us all as though he had seen enough of us to last him forever."I guess you realize your life here is over," he said. "Security's impossible now. Vamp may be dead, but the people who hired him are not. Professional killers are a dime a dozen. If one falls down on the job, they send in another.""We can never go back then?" asked Mother. "Is that what you're saying? We're going to have to stay in hiding forever?""It doesn't have to be that way," said my father. "No one can really know what happened here last night. Vamp could have murdered me before he met his own death. If so, there wouldn't be any further reason to search for me. All you'd need is a death certificate with my name on it, and the rest of you could go home and take up your lives again.""Go home without you!" exclaimed Mother. "This is no time for joking.""It's one solution," said Dad. "I think you should consider it. You were right when you said we'll have to keep hiding forever. As long as they think I'm alive, they'll consider me a danger.""Then we'll start a new life somewhere else," Mother said determinedly."You can't do that as part of the program," Tom told her. "Relocation is almost always a one-shot deal. I may be able to pull enough strings to get you new doc.u.mentation, but you can't expect to be subsidized by the government.""Uncle Max can help us," said Bram. "He and Dad are buddies. If he was to ask-""Don't hold your breath," said Lorelei. "Now that Max has no more need of your father, I doubt very much that we can count on him for anything.""I hate to believe that, but maybe it's true," said Dad. "At any rate, Max has no access to government funding. We can't keep reaching back for props to hang on to. If we'regoing to make a fresh start, it will be on our own. There's no one left to depend on except ourselves."

"And each other," Mother said softly.

"Yes-and each other," said Dad. "Do you think that will be enough to build a new life with?"

At first I thought the question was directed at Mother, but then I saw that he meant it for me as well.

"Of course," Mother said immediately, but I remained silent. The truth was, I wasn't too sure that it would be enough for us. Still, what choice did we have? We had burned our bridges, and there was nothing left for us to do but move onward.

"Do you think we can do it?" Dad asked me. His eyes were hopeful, and I knew that he desperately wanted some rea.s.surance.

Despite my reservations, I found myself nodding.

"This time I'm choosing my own name, though," I told him.

EPILOGUE.

It was December when I first saw the boy at the shopping mall.Of course, today I don't think of him as "the boy" anymore; he has a name and a place of his own in my life. At the time, though, that's all he was, just a teenage boy, standing by himself at a department store window, while crowds of holiday shoppers shoved their way past him.December is a month that is rife with nostalgia. If there's anything deep in your heart that you want to keep buried, you can count on December to bring it to the surface. That's probably why I saw him, or at least why I noticed him. Maybe it was my way of putting the past December behind me, or maybe I had a longing to live it over again.I had gone to the mall to take my brother Christmas shopping, since Mother works as a secretary for an insurance company and doesn't have the time to do that sort of thing anymore. Nor does my grandmother, who works at the Empress Boutique, a shop that specializes in high- 177.fas.h.i.+on clothing. My father hasn't found a permanent job yet, but at Christmastime he was working at a sporting goods store. He said it felt strange to have come full circle and be selling skis as he did when he first met Mother.

I now have a job myself, my first one ever. I got it to earn some spending money for Christmas and then decided to keep it until I graduate. On weekends I work at Burger King. It's sort of fun, except for the awful uniform, but at least my hair's not long enough to need a hair net. It has grown out some, but it still doesn't reach my collar, and it's going to take a long time to get it like it used to be. I'm wondering now if it's worth the effort to grow it. It's easier to take care of when it's short like this.

I'd been playing it cautious, keeping to myself a lot, determined never again to get too close to anybody. Then I saw this boy-dark-haired and tall, wearing a red and white rugby s.h.i.+rt-and my breath went out of me in a painful gasp. He had his back turned toward me, and I moved forward until I was standing next to him at the window and saw that he was looking at a crystal prism.

I'm usually very wary about talking to strangers, but I couldn't stop myself this time. Without my ever intending it, I heard myself say to him, "I had one of those once, and it really meant a lot to me." Actually, I still had the prism in a dresser drawer. It had been in one of the boxes we'd brought back from Norwood.

He turned to face me, surprised, yet obviously pleased.

"Well, hi," he said. "I wouldn't have guessed you'd know me."

"Oh?" I hadn't the slightest idea who he was.

"I've been sitting across from you all semester in chemistry. Whenever you turn around, I try to make eye contact, but you look right through me like I was made out of gla.s.s."

"I'm sorry," I said. "It hasn't been intentional."178.

"I'm glad." He smiled, and a dimple appeared at one corner of his mouth. He wasn't as handsome as Steve, and now that I saw him straight on from the front, there was less resemblance than I'd thought. Still, he was attractive, no doubt about that. He had an open face with an easy grin, and clear, light eyes that were fringed with surprisingly long lashes."The prism's pretty," I said. "Are you considering it for your girlfriend?""For my mother," he said. "Do you think it's something a mother might go for? What do you do with it anyway, wear it on a chain?""You hang it in a window, so the sun s.h.i.+nes through it," I said. "The prism fractures the light and throws out rainbows. It's supposed to be a symbol of new beginnings.""That's a nice idea." He wasn't looking at the prism. "Like I said, I've been watching you in cla.s.s, trying to think how to meet you. I figured you were new this year or, for sure, I'd know you.""We moved here in September just before school started.""Have you had a chance to get to know many of the kids yet?""It's not that easy when you enter a school in your senior year," I told him. "Especially when you're not into sports or anything.""Would you like to go out sometime, and I'll introduce you around?" He was trying to sound casual, but his face had gone suddenly scarlet. There was something oddly endearing about his blus.h.i.+ng. "With the holidays coming up, there are going to be parties."My mind flew back to one party-one special party-and one special boy who danced with me in the firelight, his breath tinged with chocolate, a strand of silver in his hair. I clung to that precious memory, letting myself savor it, experiencing once again the flavor of first love. Then I shoved 179.the memory out of my mind and sent it spinning down into the vast cavern of might-have-beens.That would be nice," I said. "I love Christmas parties." That evening, when I got home, I hung up my prism.

LOIS DUNCAN is the author of over thirty best-selling books for young people and adults. Her novels have won her high acclaim and many have been chosen as ALA Best Books for Young Adults and Junior Literary Guild selections. Her most recent novel for Delacorte Press was The Twisted Window. Among her most popular suspense stories for young people are Killing Mr. Griffin, Stranger with My Face, Summer of Fear, Daughters of Eve, Locked in Time, Down a Dark Hall, Ransom, and The Third Eye, all available in Dell Laurel-Leaf editions.

Lois Duncan is a full-time writer and a contributing editor to Woman's Day magazine. She lives with her family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.