The Chase Page 0,3

he'd taken to wearing black cotton twills and shirts. He's changed, Jenny thought. Well, no wonder. What they'd been through would have changed anyone.

He saw Jenny, who tilted her head in the general direction of the staff parking lot. The usual place. He gave a brief jerk of his head that meant agreement. He'd meet them there.

They found Michael near the English block, picking up scattered papers and books from the concrete floor.

"Jerks, porkers, bozos, Neanderthals," he was muttering.

"Who did it?" Jenny asked as Audrey checked Michael for bruises.

"Carl Vertman and Steve Matsushima." Michael's round face was flushed and his dark hair even more rumpled than usual. "It would help if you kissed it here, "he said to Audrey, pointing to the corner of his mouth.

Dee did a swift, flowing punch-and-kick to the air that looked like dancing. "I'll take care of them," she said, flashing her most barbaric smile.

"Come on, we've got to talk," Jenny said. "Has anybody seen Tom?"

"I think he cut this morning," Audrey said. "He wasn't in history or English."

Wonderful, Jenny thought as Michael got his lunch. Zachary was wearing Morbid Black, Michael was getting stomped, and Tom, the super-student, was cutting whole mornings-just when she needed him most.

They sat down by the parking lot on what was commonly known at Vista Grande High as the grassy knoll. Zach arrived and dropped first his lunch sack, then himself to the ground, folding his long, thin legs in one easy motion.

"What's happening?" Dee said.

Jenny took a deep breath.

"There's this girl," she said, and she did her best to describe the Crying Girl. "Probably a ninth grader," she said. "Do any of you guys know her?"

They all shook their heads.

"Because she said we killed Summer and hid her body, and that she knew that P.C. didn't do it. She sounded like somebody who really did know, and not just because she has faith in him or something."

Dee's sloe-black eyes were narrowed. "You think-"

"I think maybe she saw him that morning. And that means-"

"Maybe she knows where the paper house is," Michael said, looking more alarmed than excited.

"If she does, we have to find her," Jenny said.

Michael groaned.

Jenny didn't blame him. Everything about their situation was awful. The way people looked at them now, the questions in people's eyes-and the danger. The danger that no one but their group knew about.

A lot of it was Jenny's fault. It had been her own brilliant idea. Let's tell the police the truth....

There were two policewomen. One was Hawaiian or Polynesian and model-beautiful. The other was a stocky motherly person. They both examined the pile of fragments around the sliding glass door.

"But that doesn't have anything to do with Summer," Jenny said, and then she and Tom and Michael and Audrey explained it all again.

No, it hadn't been a UFO. Well, it had been sort of like a UFO-Julian was alien, all right, but he hadn't broken the door. He had come out of a game-or at least he had sucked them into a game. Or at least-All right. From the beginning again.

Jenny had bought the game on Montevideo Avenue, in a store called More Games. Okay? She'd bought it and brought it home and they had all

opened it. Yes, they'd all been here, the six of them, plus Summer. It had been a party for Tom's seventeenth birthday.

Inside had been this cardboard house. This model. They had put it together, a Victorian house, three stories and a turret. Blue.

Then they'd put these paper dolls inside that they'd colored to look like themselves. Yeah, right, they were a little old to be playing with paper dolls. But it wasn't just a dollhouse. It was a game.

The game was to draw your worst nightmare and put it in a room of the house, and then, starting at the bottom, work your way up to the top. Going through each different person's nightmare as you went.

It had seemed like a good game. Only then it turned real.

Yes, real. Real. How many different ways were there to say real? Real!

They had all sort of passed out, and when they woke up, they were in the house. Inside it. It wasn't cardboard anymore. It was solid, like an ordinary house. Then Julian had showed up.

Who was Julian? What was Julian, that was the question. If you thought of him as a demon prince, you wouldn't be too far off. He called himself the Shadow Man.

The Shadow Man. Like the Sandman, only he brings nightmares.

Look, the point