The Nightmarys - By Dan Poblocki Page 0,15

opened his eyes again, he caught a glimpse of light at the end of the hallway behind him. Stainless steel. The showers! Timothy bolted. At least now, he knew where he was going.

He burst through the doorway into the shower room’s yellow light. Beyond the showerheads was the cavernous locker room. He bounded to the last row of lockers. But when he peered around the rusted aluminum edge, the row was about half as long as usual. A T-shaped path veered where an L usually bent. Maybe he was remembering it wrong?

Without thinking, Timothy dashed forward, but when he reached the T, he knew for certain that the problem wasn’t his memory.

His locker was not there.

Timothy glanced in both directions. The shadows were encroaching from the ceiling again, the low-hanging globes inching closer to the ground. How was that possible?

Though his mind raced, Timothy walked slowly, lightly, back toward the showers. His feet were cold, and his skin was prickly. He made his way to the end of the row and peeked around the corner, but the showers were no longer there. Instead, the sight of a dirty brick wall greeted him, like a slap in the face.

“No,” Timothy groaned. He leaned against the locker at the end of the row. The coldness of the metal bit into his shoulder, and he leapt away from it, holding in a shriek.

A locker slammed. He jumped. He couldn’t tell where the noise had come from.

Someone was with him, somewhere in this big room.

Timothy shivered. Then he ran. He wasn’t sure where he was going. The more he ran, the more he realized he was not merely lost—the room didn’t look familiar at all anymore. These lockers were bashed and battered, the doors hanging off their hinges. Some of them had been painted black; graffiti was scratched into their metal surfaces—words much worse than the one he’d called Stuart earlier—strange, almost alien symbols, horrific faces with slitlike feline eyes and gaping needle-filled mouths. Timothy tried not to think that anything could be hiding just inside these doors—Stuart’s clawed monster, the Aztec idols, the cloudy creatures in the specimen jars. Things with black watchful eyes. The more Timothy ran, the more he realized that if he stopped, he’d regret it.

He came around a corner and screamed.

A man stood at the end of the corridor, his hand reaching into the nearest open locker. He turned to look at Timothy. The shadow from the brim of his hat obscured his face. His long gray overcoat hung almost all the way to the floor, barely covering his black wingtips. For a second, Timothy had the feeling he was staring at a ghost. Then the man withdrew from the locker. In his hand was the book; he used it to slam the locker shut.

Timothy was frozen with fear. He wanted to shout, Put it down! But the book didn’t even belong to him. If anything, the man was simply stealing it back.

“You shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to you,” said the man. His voice was low, resonant, a bit scratchy.

Timothy surprised himself by answering lamely, “I’m sorry.”

“You had the chance to run at the museum this morning. Shoulda used it, Timothy. Leave her behind.” The man was talking about Abigail….

Slowly, the man raised his other hand—the one without the book—toward the ceiling. In this fist, he tightly gripped a different object. The two ends of a horseshoe jutted out from either side of the man’s sleeve. A small piece of the object sparkled brightly as light from the nearest aluminum globe struck it. The overhead light grew fainter and fainter, until the locker room disappeared entirely.

Unable to see, Timothy tentatively reached out. Something pushed by him. He shouted and slammed himself against the nearest locker, flailing his arms for protection. After a few seconds, Timothy realized he was alone. He slowed his breathing, trying to calm down. I’m safe now, he told himself. Safe.

A moment later, the locker room appeared again. The lights were normal. The man was gone. Timothy stood at the end of the row where his own locker had been. Behind him, the yellow light from the shower room bled onto the concrete floor.

Timothy needed to get out of there. Beyond the showers, the crooked hallway revealed the way to the pool. But even that seemed too far away. Timothy turned and dashed around the corner, toward the gymnasium’s lobby.

Once there, Timothy was flooded with relief. As several passing students stared at him, he