Read Online House of Reckoning by John Saul - Free Book Online Page B

then turned his attention to his backpack, struggling to keep his eyes from wandering even for an instant to the horror going on around him. His fingers closed on a pill bottle, he shook one out and washed it down with milk.
    “Taking your crazy pill, Nick?” someone yelled from across the cafeteria.
    “Wouldn’t want you to miss your pill,” someone else said. “You might become normal.”
    “Nah,” came an instant rejoinder. “He’ll never be normal.”
    Once it started, the mocking only grew worse as everyone around him fed on one another’s insults.
    Get out!
    He had to get out before the new girl heard them, before she understood what they were saying, who they were talking about. He couldn’t let her see him the way the rest of them did. Nick grabbed his book bag, picked up his tray, and started toward the door. He kept his eyes straight ahead, ignored the taunts, tried to ignore the hallucinations, but all around him blood was spurting from torn arteries, faces were dissolving as if doused in acid, and maggots tumbled from empty sockets where the eyes that were watching him should have been.
    He dropped his tray on the counter next to the kitchen door, then fled to the library, where at least he might hide in the stacks until his medicine kicked in.
    But one of these days the medicine wasn’t going to work anymore.
    And then his only hope might be the girl whose mere presence seemed to calm the voices, if not completely silence them.
    Sarah paused at the door of the art room, steeling herself against the glare she’d receive from the teacher for being five minutes late for the last class of the day. Then would come the stares of her classmates. Butshe’d moved as fast as she could, and as she pushed her way into the art studio, her whole body ached.
    Instead of glaring at her, though, the teacher actually smiled, pausing in the midst of distributing oversized sheets of drawing paper to the class. “Come on in. You must be Sarah Crane.”
    “Sorry I’m late,” Sarah muttered, sliding as inconspicuously as she could into the closest empty chair to the door. She shrugged out of her heavy backpack and let it drop to the floor next to her seat.
    “You’ve all read the textbook about perspective,” the teacher said, laying a sheet of heavy drawing paper on the table in front of Sarah. “Today we’re going to put that theory into practice.”
    But Sarah hadn’t read the textbook and knew nothing about perspective. So here was yet another class for which she was completely unprepared. She gazed down at the blank sheet of paper the teacher placed in front of her and wondered what she was going to do. But then the teacher was speaking again, and Sarah felt a twinge of hope—she was giving the class a quick review of the text, and though she seemed to be talking to the whole class, Sarah had a feeling the words were being spoken just for her.
    She stole a look at her class schedule to remind herself of the teacher’s name.
    Philips. Bettina Philips.
    “Things that are closer are larger,” Ms. Philips was saying as Sarah looked up again. “If you draw a road, the telephone poles closest are tallest and biggest. For the picture to appear real, everything in it must be focused on a vanishing point somewhere in the picture. You also have to consider the point of view of the artist. Where is the artist—or photographer—situated in order to capture the scene? So now I want all of you to think of something to draw, and concentrate on showing it from your perspective.”
    Sarah closed her eyes and an image of the huge house that had haunted her nightmares rose in her memory. But today, with a blank sheet of paper in front of her, the details of the structure were far clearer than they’d been in her dreams. It was a stone house with a gabled roof, and she tried to imagine it with morning sun throwing shadows on the angles of the roof. And if she were farther from it than she ever was in her dreams,