"There's nobody inside," said Mr. Shelby, mouth twitching under his mustache. "But you gals yell if you want anything. I'll be around."
The door slammed shut behind them with a curiously final sound.
"Work," said Meredith resignedly, and put the box on the floor.
Elena nodded, looking up and down the big empty room. Every year the Student Council held a Haunted House as a fund-raiser. Elena had been on the decorating committee for the last two years, along with Bonnie and Meredith, but it was different being chairman. She had to make decisions that would affect everyone, and she couldn't even rely on what had been done in years past.
The Haunted House was usually set up in a lumberyard warehouse, but with the growing uneasiness about town it had been decided that the school gym was safer. For Elena, it meant rethinking the whole interior design, and with less than three weeks now until Halloween.
"It's actually pretty spooky here," said Meredith quietly. And therewas something disturbing about being in the big closed room, Elena thought. She found herself lowering her voice.
"Let's measure it first," she said. They moved down the room, their footsteps echoing hollowly.
"All right," said Elena when they had finished. "Let's get to work." She tried to shake off her feeling of uneasiness, telling herself that it was ridiculous to feel unsettled in the school gym, with Bonnie and Meredith beside her and an entire football team practicing not two hundred yards away.
The three of them sat on the bleachers with pens and notebooks in hand. Elena and Meredith consulted the design sketches for previous years while Bonnie bit her pen and gazed around thoughtfully.
"Well, here's the gym," said Meredith, making a quick sketch in her notebook. "And here's where the people are going to have to come in. Now we could have the Bloody Corpse at the very end... By the way, who's going to be the Bloody Corpse this year?"
"Coach Lyman, I think. He did a good job last year, and he helps keep the football guys in line." Elena pointed to their sketch. "Okay, we'll partition this off and make it the Medieval Torture Chamber. They'll go straight out of that and into the Room of the Living Dead..."
"I think we should have druids," said Bonnie abruptly.
"Have what?" said Elena, and then, as Bonnie started to yell "droo-ids," she waved a quelling hand. "All right, all right, I remember. But why?"
"Because they're the ones who invented Halloween. Really. It started out as one of their holy days, when they would build fires and put out turnips with faces carved in them to keep evil spirits away. They believed it was the day when the line between the living and the dead was thinnest. And they were scary, Elena. They performed human sacrifices. We could sacrifice Coach Lyman."
"Actually, that's not a bad idea," said Meredith. "The Bloody Corpse could be a sacrifice. You know, on a stone altar, with a knife and pools of blood all around. And then when you get really close, he suddenly sits up."
"And gives you heart failure," said Elena, but she had to admit itwas a good idea, definitely scary. It made her feel a little sick just thinking about it. All that blood... but it was only Karo syrup, really.
The other girls had gone quiet, too. From the boys' locker next door, they could hear the sound of water running and lockers banging, and over that indistinct voices shouting.
"Practice is over," murmured Bonnie. "It must be dark outside."
"Yes, and Our Hero is getting all washed up," said Meredith, cocking an eyebrow at Elena. "Want to peek?"
"I wish," said Elena, only half jokingly. Somehow, indefinably, the atmosphere in the room had darkened. Just at the moment shedid wish she could see Stefan, could be with him.
"Have you heard anything more about Vickie Bennett?" she asked suddenly.
"Well," said Bonnie after a moment, "I did hear that her parents were getting her a psychiatrist."
"A shrink? Why?"
"Well... I guess they think that those things she told us were hallucinations or something. And I heard her nightmares are pretty bad."
"Oh," said Elena. The sounds from the boys' locker room were fading, and they heard an outside door slam. Hallucinations, she thought, hallucinations and nightmares. For some reason, she suddenly remembered that night in the graveyard, that night when Bonnie had sent them all running from something none of them could see.
"We'd better get back to business," said Meredith. Elena shook herself out of her reverie and nodded.
"We... we could have a graveyard," Bonnie said tentatively, as if she'd been reading Elena's thoughts. "In the Haunted House, I mean."
"No," said Elena sharply. "No, we'll just stick with what we have," she added in a calmer voice, and bent over her pad again.
Once again there was no sound but the soft scratching of pens and the rustle of paper.
"Good," said Elena at last. "Now we only need to measure for the different partitions. Somebody's going to have to get in behind the bleachers... What now?"
The lights in the gym had flickered and gone down to half power.
"Oh,no ," said Meredith, exasperated. The lights flickered again, went out, and returned dimly once more.
"I can't read a thing," said Elena, staring at what now seemed to be a featureless piece of white paper. She looked up at Bonnie and Meredith and saw two white blobs of faces.
"Something must be wrong with the emergency generator," said Meredith. "I'll get Mr. Shelby."