Seeing this message spelled out in front of him, Sam jumped, almost breaking the contact. After what happened next, he wished he had.
Dana moaned.
Sam looked at her and recoiled in shock. She was shaking fiercely, as if a high-voltage current were running through her veins. Her teeth were chattering, and the sound quickly filled the room, making it seem as if a herd of skeletons were charging past. The hand on his spine squeezed tighter.
There’s no way Jake is causing her to do that,his inner voice said.
Everyone in the room was frozen in a state of shock.
No one moved to help her.
Over her shoulder, Sam was surprised to see Katelynn staring across the room in their direction, her face as pale as a ghost. He had been so engrossed he hadn’t even noticed that she’d arrived.
Beneath his fingers, Sam felt the planchette begin to move again with slow, deliberate speed.
In a voice shaking with fear, Casey read the message aloud.
“SAY GOODBYE TO DANA.”
As if in response, Dana suddenly screamed. The sound of her cry broke the paralysis that had held everyone in its grip. Sam jumped away from the board as if it were alive. Jake grabbed Dana. She was still shaking, more violently now, her heels drumming in a frenzy on the floor.
“She’s having a fit!” someone yelled.
“Hit the lights!”
A moment later the room was filled with electric brilliance as someone complied with the request.
Sam recovered his wits and moved to help Jake. He held Dana’s feet steady. Someone else, he thought it might be Bill, pinned her arms.
Blood was flowing from her mouth, and Sam realized she’d clamped her teeth down on her tongue.Probably bit the damn thing nearly in half . He watched as Jake clenched the sides of her jaw at some hidden nerve point and forced her mouth open. Inside it was a mess; blood and saliva mixing into a crimson froth that kept them from seeing how much damage she’d done to herself. Trying to find a way to prevent her from tearing herself up further, Jake forced his wallet between her jaws, then let go of his hold. Her teeth immediately clamped down on the wallet’s leather surface like a spring-loaded vise.
Katelynn pushed her way over to them. “Someone call the hospital and get someone up here quick,” she told the crowd. She turned to Jake. “Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. Does anyone know if she’s epileptic?” he asked.
No one did.
Another minute passed. The convulsions slowed, then stopped altogether. Dana lay in Jake’s arms, limp but still conscious.
Katelynn removed the wallet from her mouth and tried to reassure her. “Take it easy. You’ve had some kind of a seizure. Help is on the way, just lie still.”
Her gaze rolled around the room, wide and vacant, not really noticing any of them around her. Then she saw Jake. She stiffened in his arms, her eyes growing almost comically wide. Her left hand shot up and gripped the front of his shirt and pulled, dragging his face down close to her lips. She said something to him, but Sam was too far away to hear.
Jake blanched in response.
The mobile emergency team hustled into the room then, and everyone moved back to allow them some space to work in. Sam, Jake, and Katelynn backed away as well, noticing as they did so that the party had rapidly broken up around them. Only a few people were still in the apartment.
Katelynn stood at Sam’s side, her face pale. “What happened in there?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. We were using the Ouija board, and she suddenly went nuts, threw a fit of some kind.” He shivered.Jake was moving that planchette, he kept telling himself.Just Jake, no one else.
That small voice spoke up again.Why don’t you ask him, it said, and he decided to do just that.
The medics loaded Dana onto a stretcher and carried her down the stairs. Jake, Sam, and Katelynn followed the emergency team out of the building and watched as Dana was loaded into an ambulance. Lights flashing, the vehicle roared off toward the complex’s gates.
Jake turned to face Sam.
One glance into Jake’s eyes and Sam felt his fear grow. His blood ran cold and sluggish through his veins. He wrapped his arms around his chest in an unconscious attempt to warm himself.
Jake’s scared,he realized, recognizing the look in his friend’s eyes.
That frightened Sam more than anything that had happened that night.If Jake’s scared, he told himself,then I should be terrified . Abruptly, he realized that he was.
What Jake said next made things worse.
“Were you moving that thing, Sam?”
The question froze him where he stood. Numbly, Sam shook his head. He didn’t want to hear what he knew was coming next, but there was no escaping it.
“I wasn’t either, Sam. I swear it.”
Next to them, Katelynn said, “If it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t Sam, then who…”
Jake could only shake his head in reply to her question.
But Sam thought he knew. There was only one person who called him Sammy.Gabriel. Something must have happened. He turned and began pushing his way back through the crowd, desperate to reach his car, his sudden fear so overwhelming that he didn’t bother telling his friends where he was headed.
The two of them stood there for a few minutes as the crowd dispersed, each of them lost in his own thoughts, until Katelynn broke the silence.
“What did she say to you, Jake?”
Jake hesitated, then answered in a subdued tone. “She said that someone in the room was going to die soon.”
In the distance, the ambulance siren shrieked like a banshee into the night’s darkness.
23
PUZZLE PIECES
Not wanting to be alone, the two of them walked over to The Hemingway, an all-night coffeehouse and Internet café on the other side of campus.
The café consisted of one long room filled with odds and ends of furniture, tables and chairs, mismatched sofas and love seats, even a few booths from a now defunct diner, really anything the students could get their hands on. A small stage stood to the left of the bar, and throughout the night the poets and writers who typically haunted the place would get up to read selections of their works, while others listened attentively or carried on conversations amongst themselves in muted tones. The walls were fashioned of unfinished wood, decorated here and there with posted notices of poetry readings and flyers from a variety of political and artistic groups.
They took a seat in the back, away from most of the other tables so that they could talk freely without being overheard. Katelynn was the first to broach the subject.
“What’s going on, Jake?”
“Damned if I know,” he answered gruffly, still disconcerted both by what had happened at the party and by Sam’s odd behavior immediately thereafter.
“Come on, Jake. I’m serious.”
“So am I, Katelynn. I don’t have a clue. It’s bad enough that I find a corpse every time I turn around. Adding Ouija boards and communication with the dead does not make me feel any better. Never mind Sam’s rushing off like that.” Jake poured himself another beer from the pitcher on the table before him. While he wouldn’t admit it, he was scared. Getting drunk seemed a good solution, and he fully intended to put his plan into motion without delay. “What the heck were you doing at the party anyway? I thought you were studying tonight.”
“I was. Something happened.”
She took her time, explaining the dreams that she’d been having and her “attack” at the library. She told him about the odd sensation of looking through another’s eyes and about her increasing belief that what she was seeing was not imaginary but real.
Jake had had enough weirdness for one night, however. “Come on, Katelynn. You can’t really believe that.”