Free Book of Horrors (Nightmare Hall) by Diane Hoh Page B

Just get me out. Hurry!”
    “I’ll have to go get a rope.”
    “No, wait!”
    “At McCoy’s. Hang on!”
    When his face disappeared, Reed felt sick. Someone had been there, and now no one was. She was alone again.
    But she knew he’d had no choice. He couldn’t get her out without a rope.
    When Link returned, Rain was with him. He leaned over the edge of the pit, his face white with fear. “Reed? Reed, are you okay?”
    “I told you she’s okay,” Link said impatiently, “now help me with this rope. We’ve got to get her out of there.”
    It seemed to take forever. They dropped a rope for Reed to tie around her waist. Then, when it was secure, they hauled her up. The shaft was so narrow, Reed kept banging against the cement walls. She tried to help by pushing with her hands against the cement, scraping the skin off her palms.
    Finally, she was close enough to the lip of the hole to pull herself up over the edge. She lay there, panting heavily, thinking that the ground had never, ever felt so good to anyone.
    “This is really irresponsible!” Link fumed, helping Reed to her feet. “She could have been killed! What’s the matter with you people, anyway? Don’t you know how dangerous an open well is?”
    “I don’t understand this,” Rain said slowly, his eyes searching the surrounding area. “This is the old well for our property. But it’s been covered ever since we moved in. What happened to the lid?”
    Although Link briefly helped in the search, they didn’t find the lid.
    “I can’t believe this,” Rain muttered. “I never thought … are you sure you’re okay, Reed?”
    Reed nodded, too exhausted to think about where the well cover might have gone. Her legs ached and her back hurt and her head throbbed.
    Link wanted to take her to the infirmary, but she declined. “I hurt all over, but I can tell nothing’s broken. Just bruised and battered. I need a couple of aspirin and my own bed, that’s all.”
    “You’d better find that cover and get it back on,” Link warned Rain, “before someone else falls in there, and isn’t as lucky as Reed was.”
    Reed didn’t feel the least bit lucky. But she knew he was right. If he hadn’t come looking for her, if it had begun snowing and the snow had fallen fast and furiously, as it sometimes did, if … She shuddered. Better not to think about “if.”
    “I’d been looking all over for you,” Link told her as he helped her along the path to campus. “Didn’t you hear me yelling?”
    “Not until you got to the well. How did you know I was down there?”
    “Your pack. It was on the ground, and then I saw the hole and—” he squeezed Reed’s arm, “I thought for sure you were dead. Did you leave work early? Why didn’t you wait for me?”
    “I don’t know,” Reed answered honestly. “It won’t happen again.”
    “No, it won’t,” Link said, his voice grim.
    Although Victoria McCoy phoned later that day, while Reed was resting in her room, to express her horror over the incident and to offer Reed a few days off, Reed didn’t take her up on the offer.
    “No permanent damage,” she said, knowing even as she said it that she would have more than one nightmare about her stay in the well. “I don’t need any time off, but thanks, anyway.”
    “We’ve already replaced the cover,” the author assured her. “I can’t imagine what became of the old one. I’m so glad you weren’t seriously injured.”
    Tell my legs that, Reed thought, reaching for the bottle of aspirin on her nightstand.
    But she knew how lucky she’d been. She could remember, now that she was safe, that one horrible, fleeting moment during her descent down that well shaft, when the thought that she might not survive the fall had occurred to her.
    A horrible feeling, knowing that you might be dying and being completely helpless to do anything to stop it.
    Nothing she had ever read in McCoy’s books had prepared her for that feeling.
    You left that part out,