She reached the broad doorway into the common room. And stopped. And stood stock-still, gaping in horror.
Her dream had come true and death was everywhere. Bodies were everywhere, all over the common room. Murdered corpses, their flesh ripped by bullet wounds. They lay on the chairs, their blood staining the upholstery. They lay sprawled on the floor in red puddles of blood. Everywhere Jennifer looked . . . the dead, the dead!
She drew back, moving her hand to her mouth, about to scream, when all at once . . .
“Here we go!”
Startled, Jennifer let out a little cry and turned to see . . .
Just the angel lady, coming toward her with a tray. A sandwich. A glass of juice. A cookie. On a tray. Angel smiling.
“Go on in,” she said, nodding toward the common room.
Jennifer looked again. She let out her breath in a long sigh.
Everything was fine now. The dead were gone. The blood was gone. The common room was empty. Big comfortable chairs. Two sofas. A television set on the wall. Everything was normal except . . .
Except the clock. The round clock high on the wall. The hands of the clock were spinning, spinning quickly. Hours going by. Days.
Tomorrow
, Jennifer thought.
Tomorrow
.
“Go on in,” said the lady again.
Jennifer stepped through the door into the common room. Everything was normal now, but she could smell gun smoke. She could smell blood. She could smell death.
“I’ll just put this right over here,” the woman said.
We’re going to kill them all
, whispered a demon suddenly in Jennifer’s ear.
Jennifer put her hands on her ears to close out the whisper—but then quickly took them away again because she didn’t want the angel lady to see.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
She had to call Sam. She had to warn Sam.
“Is there a phone somewhere?” she asked—she spoke the words before she even thought them.
The lady set the tray down on a small table by one of the armchairs. She straightened and looked at Jennifer. “Well, there is,” she said, “but you’re only supposed to use it at certain times . . .”
“I . . .” Jennifer tried to think of an answer—and the answer came into her head as if out of nowhere. “I want to call my friend. He hasn’t heard from me in days. I want him to know I’m all right.”
The lady hesitated but then smiled, a white angel smile in her brown face, and said, “Well, since you just got out of the secure ward, I guess it’s only right to let you call a friend. You want to eat first or . . . ?”
“No,” said Jennifer, the right words just coming to her. “I’m afraid it’ll get to be too late and he’ll be asleep.”
“Okay. Well, let’s see what we can do.”
The lady led her out of the common room. Down the hall. As Jennifer walked behind her, she heard whispers, whispers, whispers but couldn’t make out the words they said. She thought they were laughing.
“Here we are,” said the lady. “Just go back to the common room when you’re done and your sandwich will be waiting for you.”
The lady unlocked the door of a small room. Inside there were several desks with dividers on them—walls that rose out of the desktops, protecting them from the other desks. On each desk there was a telephone. No one else was in the room.
“No more than five minutes, all right?” said the lady in white. “That’s the rule.”
“All right,” said Jennifer.
The lady in white left her there alone. Jennifer sat down at one of the desks. She lowered her head low, low, low, almost pressing her cheek to the desktop so she was hidden away, so no one could see her over the dividers, and she couldn’t see anyone, couldn’t see the rest of the room.
She reached for the phone. Her hand was trembling. She was trying to stay calm. She dialed Sam Hopkins’s number. She knew it by heart.
“Hello?” Sam said.
Jennifer was so happy to hear his voice. She said his magic name. Said it twice.“Sam Hopkins. Sam Hopkins.”
“Jennifer?” said Sam.
“I have to tell you what’s going to happen next,” she said quickly. She had to talk quickly before the demons found her. “I can see. I can see with my eyes. Through the lies. I see who dies. I see what’s going to happen, Sam.”
There was a pause. Then Sam asked, “What do you see, Jennifer?”
She tried to tell him. About the bodies in the common room. About the moving clock. Tomorrow. It was going to happen tomorrow. She began to grow excited as she tried to make him understand. She lifted her head. Holding on to the phone, clutching the phone in her shaking, quaking, sweating hands, she stood up.
Her breath caught in her throat.
There it was again. Death. Everywhere. The bodies. Everywhere. The blood in pools. Bodies splayed over the desks and sprawled on the floor. And the clock on the wall, spinning.
Tomorrow.
Jennifer tried to cry out, but her voice would not rise higher than a whisper.
“So many dead, Sam!” she whispered. “So many dead!”
“Jennifer.” Sam’s frightened voice came back to her. “Who’s dead? What’s happening? Tell me what you see.”
“Tomorrow!” The words would barely come out of her. “Tomorrow! So many!”
“Jennifer, tell me what you see!”
She was about to try to explain it to him, but now the door to the telephone room opened. The lady in white, the angel lady, came in.
Jennifer looked at her and then looked around the room. All the dead were gone. Everything was back to normal. Jennifer could only stand, staring.
“Time to go,” the angel lady told her.
And she walked over to Jennifer, took the phone from her slack hand, and gently hung it up in the cradle.
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.”