The Hunter Page 0,53

But she'd sit there breathing hard anyway, choking on her own fear.

Her room always looked strange in that unnatural middle-of-the-night brightness. Subtly different than it did in the daytime. It was always a long time before she would be able to turn the light off again.

And underneath, in her heart of hearts, she would feel it had been real. Not just a dream. Her eyes had been open when she'd seen the thing above her, and it didn't matter if that was stupid and nobody could see in such darkness. She'd seen it anyway. It had been there.

Jenny had thought everybody went through things like that.

"I hate you," she whispered.

"I'd have thought you'd want my help right now." He nodded at the blank wall. "That's your nightmare, Jenny-but how are you going to get into it? And if you can't get into it, how are you going to get through it?"

He wants you panicked, Jenny told herself. He wants to scare you, to make you think you need his help.

But she didn't need it. She refused to need it.

She smiled suddenly. She could feel it was lopsided. She held up the cadet blue crayon.

"I'll get in with this," she said and smoothed out her blank slip of paper.

His eyelids drooped in amusement, and his voice was a caress. "But how will you remember. You don't know what to draw. You've spent all these years trying to forget____"

"I know enough," Jenny said. She wondered just how much Julian knew about her own private nightmare, the one she'd spent so long running away from.

She had the chilling feeling that she was about to find out.

"I know what it starts with," she said. "It starts with my grandfather's basement, when I was five years old."

She put the paper flat against a mirror and began to draw.

Chapter 13

Cadet blue, which had just looked pale on the mirror, turned out to be gray on paper.

Jenny was no artist, but she could draw simple things. Like a square-that was her grandfather's basement. Steps, going out of the top of the picture up to the house. A desk against one wall. A couch. Three or four large bookcases.

That was all she could remember. She hoped it was enough.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Julian was gone again. Good.

She put the slip of paper on the floor in front of the blank wall.

The flash of light was exactly like a flashgun going off in her eyes, leaving her with dancing afterimages. Score one for Zach, she thought. When she could see again, she found herself looking in a mirror.

It had worked.

She could feel her pulse in her wrists and throat as well as her chest. God, don't let me run away, she thought.

After so many years of fighting not to remember this, she was going to throw herself right into it. It was going to be bad. How bad, she'd have to find out when it happened.

She pressed the red button. The blue light went on. The mirrored door slid open.

She didn't give herself a chance to look at anything before she stepped inside.

Golden sunlight slanted in from small windows set high on the walls. To Jenny's utter surprise she felt a thrill of excitement and recognition.

I remember those windows! I remember...

The door slid shut behind her, but she was already stepping out to the center of the room, looking around in wonder. Taking in the colors, the profusion of objects.

It's smaller than I thought it would be-and even more crowded. But it's my grandfather's basement.

Her grandfather, though, wasn't there.

That's right. He wasn't here that day. I remember. I let myself in the house and went looking for him, but I couldn't find him anywhere upstairs.

So ... I looked down here-I think. I must have. I don't remember doing it, but I must have.

Jenny turned toward the stairs, which ended in a blank wall at the top. No door, of course, because this was a nightmare. The wall was as blank as her mind-her sense of delighted recognition had stopped cold. She had no idea what came next.

But as she stared, she seemed to see the ghost of a child looking down from the top step. A little girl wearing shorts, with wind-ruffled hair and a scab on her knee.

Herself. At age five.

It was almost like watching a movie. She could see the little girl's thongs flap as she ran down the stairs. She could see the child's lips open as she called for her grandfather,