John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

“Is she gay?” Sergeant Grant asked, making a note of what the McCormick girl had said.

Dawn rolled her eyes. The other girls only giggled.

“What about drugs?” Grant went on.

The girls glanced at each other, and Dawn could see three of them blushing. “Not Lindsay,” she finally said. “Lindsay was as squeaky clean as you can get.” “Not as squeaky as you!” Tina McCormick threw in, and Grant began to wonder if Dawn D'Angelo knew Lindsay Marshall as well as she claimed she did. But when he looked at Sharon Spandler, the coach shrugged.

“I never heard any talk about Lindsay using,” she said.

Grant raised his brows noncommittally. In his experience, most of the teachers were as ignorant about kids’ drug use as their parents were. “So the thing that was upsetting her was that her folks wanted to move her to the city?” he asked, his eyes once more sweeping the group.

And once more it was Dawn D'Angelo who responded. “She was really upset about that. She didn’t want to go — she wanted to spend her senior year here, and be head cheerleader and then graduate with all the rest of us.” She glanced around at the other girls, who were nodding in agreement. “I mean, we all grew up together — she hated the idea of going someplace she didn’t know with a bunch of kids she didn’t know.” “How unhappy was she about that?” Grant asked.

“Very,” Dawn said. “Very, very, extremely.”

The other girls nodded again, and so did Sharon Spandler.

“Unhappy enough to run away?” the policeman went on.

A long silence fell over the group gathered around the cafeteria table — a silence that told Grant as much as anything the girls had actually said out loud.

They didn’t know.

They didn’t know anything at all.

Sergeant Grant took business cards from his shirt pocket and handed them around the table. “If you can think of anything, no matter how small, or if you hear something, call me, okay?” “Do you think she’s all right?” someone asked.

“I hope so,” he said, standing up and closing his notebook. The girls watched in silence as he turned away from the table and walked out of the cafeteria.

Sergeant Grant sat quietly for a moment in his warm car with his eyes closed. There were no red flags in this case.

No sign of forced entry to the home.

No hint of anyone who Lindsay might have gotten on the wrong side of — no boyfriends, no drug dealers.

Apparently no enemies at all.

But unhappy.

Very unhappy, and probably very angry at her parents.

He sighed, picked up his notebook, made a few notes about his interview with Lindsay’s friends, then radioed his office.

“I still think she’s a runaway,” he said. “We’ll keep our eyes open and keep talking to people, but I’m thinking she’ll show up by the end of the week. Give her some time to cool off.” Still, as he started his car and pulled away from the curb in front of Camden Green High, he wondered once more about that real estate agent. What was his name?

Mancuso — that was it. Rick Mancuso.

Something in his voice just hadn’t sounded right.

Lindsay’s eyes opened slowly.

She was still bound to the chair, still surrounded by darkness. Darkness hiding terrors she could feel, even if she couldn’t see them. But even closer than the terrors concealed in the darkness were the ones inside her.

Pain.

Numbness.

Exhaustion.

And thirst.

A thirst so terrible it threatened to consume her. Her lips were swollen and cracked, her tongue dry. She ached for water. Visions began to dance in the darkness around her — brief glimpses of the water her body craved: herself, swimming in the school pool; birds, flitting in water fountains; cold ocean spray breaking over rocks; glasses of chilled soda; lawn sprinklers soaking cool green grass. She wanted to reach for the visions, touch them, feel the water. But her body had long ago gone from mild discomfort to aching and twitching, and now it felt coldly numb. And the thirst was so overwhelming that even her eyelids felt like sandpaper as they moved across eyeballs gone dry from lack of moisture.

If she cried, she knew she would shed no tears — the thirst made her feel as if every drop of water had been leached from her body.

She tried to whisper to Shannon but no sound came from her parched throat. And was Shannon even there anymore? She strained to listen, searching in the silence for the sound of the other girl’s breathing, but heard nothing.

She let her eyelids close, and silently prayed for unconsciousness.

A sound.

A scraping sound. Then bright light — a light so dazzling she reflexively twisted her head away. Then she slowly opened her eyes, and her heart pounded as she felt whatever evil that had locked her in this dungeon come closer.

Steeling herself, she twisted her head around to face the evil looming over her, but all she saw was a black silhouette in the blinding light.

Then she heard a voice — Shannon’s voice — moan a single word: “No.”

Now, in the glow filling the chamber, Lindsay could see her crouched on a mattress on the floor of what seemed to be a long, narrow, unfinished basement. Shannon’s back was pressed to the wall and her knees pressed against her chest, as if they could somehow protect her from the evil presence that hung against the bright light. Her long, dark hair was matted, and the deathly pallor of her face made her look far older than Lindsay, though her voice sounded much younger.

As the dark silhouette took form and became the figure of a man, Shannon moaned again and hid her face against her knees.

The man passed Shannon and came directly toward her. Lindsay’s heart pounded so hard she could hear it throbbing in her ears, and her breath caught in her lungs.

He came close enough so her nostrils filled with the same musky odor he’d left in her bedroom.

He set something on the floor, then touched her.

Touched her breast, squeezing the nipple so hard it hurt.

She reflexively tried to jerk away from his touch, but the object pressing against her throat kept her from moving her head more than a fraction of an inch.

Then he was holding something in front of her, and for an instant Lindsay was certain it was another hallucination. But then he gently fed the straw emerging from the neck of a water bottle through her parched lips.

Reflexively, she began to suck.

Water!

Fresh, cool water!

She greedily drank as fast as the straw could deliver the soothing liquid across her tongue, certain that at any moment her captor would snatch it away.

And all too soon, he did…

Lindsay licked her lips and peered up at him.

A scream rose in her throat as she saw the leering grin that hovered above her, but it died away to little more than a helpless gurgling sound as she realized that he wasn’t grinning at all.

He was wearing a mask.

A white surgeon’s mask upon which two huge and lascivious lips had been drawn with some kind of red marker. Above the surgeon’s mask his face was covered with a black ski mask, his eyes glinting almost invisibly from deep beneath the eyeholes.

His body was cloaked with a black raincoat.

Then her thirst broke through her terror and her head tipped up, almost against her own will. “Please,” she whispered, her voice sounding as if someone else must have uttered the single word.

“Quiet!” the man commanded. He reached for her breast once more, and though every fiber of her being wanted to shrink away, her need for water was stronger. She made herself hold still beneath his touch, and finally he held the bottle to her lips once more.

He bent down, and when he straightened, he held a bowl and spoon.