Free The Whisperer (Nightmare Hall) by Diane Hoh Page A

that?
    Of course he had.
    And that changed everything. Tossing a snake inside room 620 had never been intended as a prank. Couldn’t have been. She had been blackmailed into doing something that could have taken someone’s life.
    “Boy, you look worse than Bethany,” a girl standing next to Shea said to her. “Maybe you should leave. This whole scene too much for you?”
    Yes, it was. That poor girl lying on the floor, corpselike, while out in the hall the snake was still on display. Yes, it was all too much for Shea. At any moment, she just might start screaming herself.
    But she couldn’t leave. Not yet. Not until she learned that Bethany was going to be all right … if Bethany was going to be all right.
    After what seemed like hours, the paramedics arrived.
    “She’s just fainted,” one paramedic announced when she had performed a cursory examination of the patient.
    Shea let out a huge sigh of relief. Annette, kneeling beside Bethany, did the same.
    “But she could be experiencing some minor cardiac distress,” the woman continued. “We’re going to take her with us, check her out thoroughly.” She glanced at Annette. “You said something scared her?”
    “Yes. A snake. Someone tossed it into our room. Bethany is deathly afraid of snakes. She got hysterical the minute she saw what it was. And then she collapsed.”
    Shea heard “deathly afraid of snakes” and felt a surge of pure hatred toward the whispering voice on the telephone. A “joke,” he had said. “Perfectly harmless,” he’d told her.
    Bethany could have died.
    Annette went with the ambulance, Mariah was taken back to the lab, and the crowd began to disperse. Shea headed wearily back to Devereaux.
    The phone was ringing when Shea quietly unlocked the door and entered her room.
    She stared through the dark toward the ringing telephone. No … no, it couldn’t be, not now!
    “Mmm, get that, will you?” Tandy murmured sleepily, and buried her head under her pillow.
    Moving stiffly, like a puppet, Shea walked over and picked up the receiver with an icy hand.
    “Congratulations,” came the sinister whisper. “You done good, kiddo! Real good!”

Chapter 10
    S HEA WAS NOT ABOUT to talk to the whisperer with Tandy in the room. Without saying a word, she slammed the receiver down and unplugged the phone. It wasn’t as if anyone else would be calling them this late.
    “Who was that?” Tandy muttered, emerging from beneath her pillow.
    “Wrong number.” Shea said irritably, as she got into bed.
    A joke … it was supposed to be a joke. Now Bethany was in the infirmary … and the whisperer still had the videotape and the paperweight. It was all supposed to be over by now, and it wasn’t.
    She rolled over on her back again and wondered if it ever would be over.
    She shouldn’t have slammed the phone down like that. Maybe he’d called to tell her he was ready to keep his promise.
    What if she’d made him so angry, he’d decided not to keep his promise at all?
    And did it really matter, Shea thought wearily as the sleep of total exhaustion overtook her, after what had happened to Bethany?
    The following morning, she half-expected the telephone to ring immediately when she plugged it in. It didn’t. But as long as she was in the same room with it, she couldn’t relax.
    “I’m going over to the infirmary to check on Bethany,” she told Tandy. She had already filled Tandy in on the snake episode, carefully omitting her part in it.
    “Are you going to stop in and say hello to Dr. Stark while you’re there?” Tandy asked with a teasing grin. “I know how much you must miss her.”
    “Dr. Stark? She’s at the hospital in town.”
    “They’re supposed to transfer her up here this morning.” Tandy began brushing the long, pale yellow waves. “Coop told me. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. Dr. Stark wanted to be back on campus. They thought she’d get better faster if she was around her beloved students.” Tandy’s tone