The Coffin (Nightmare Hall) by Diane Hoh Page B

than an ounce or two. He set aside the first section, which was no wider than the music room door, and began nailing another group of boards together.
    “What are you doing?” Tanner cried again, when he had two narrow “walls” fastened together, had set them aside, and was beginning a third. “What is that?”
    “You’ll see,” he said grimly, and continued pounding.
    Tanner suddenly wasn’t at all sure she wanted Silly to show up. He wouldn’t like the interruption, and that claw hammer looked like it would make a nasty but very effective weapon. It wasn’t as if he’d never hit anyone on the head before. Tanner closed her eyes in pain at the thought of Silly being attacked, and had to quickly tell herself that her imagination was working overtime. Nothing like that could happen. It was too horrible.
    But what was he doing?
    “I’m hungry,” she said, hoping to distract him. He was working on a fourth section of boards. “I need something to eat. You said you didn’t want me to get sick. If you don’t feed me, I will get sick.”
    He continued to pound nails into the boards. “Later. Shut up.”
    Tanner sank back against the couch, trying to think. If he went out to the kitchen to get her something to eat, maybe he’d leave the hammer behind, and she could get her hands on it.
    But, she thought dismally, he’d never be that careless.
    The four sections were completed, lying in wait on the floor. Holding half a dozen long, heavy nails at a time between the lips of the rubber mask, he left one section lying on the floor while he attached one section at each side, creating a lidless “box.” Then, with the “box” still lying on its back, he moved a handful of shorter boards from the leather chair to the floor and used them to seal first one end of the “box” and then the other.
    It was such a bizarre sight, the figure in the green plaid flannel shirt wearing the gray, wrinkled, rubber mask, nails between its lips, the clumps of white hair bobbing as he hammered away, connecting the walls to each other, like someone fitting together the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.
    She would never be able to describe this scene to anyone and expect them to believe it.
    Tanner watched intently. A box? He was making a box?
    She stopped breathing. A box … if it had had a lid, it would have looked exactly like …
    A coffin.
    No. No!
    Tanner’s heart felt as if it were sheathed in ice, and her hands were so stiff she couldn’t flex her fingers.
    Even when he stood the box upright, it still looked like a coffin.
    She didn’t want to think about why he would be constructing a coffin.
    While she continued watching with growing apprehension, he dragged the fourth wall over and attached that section not with nails, but with a set of large brass hinges.
    Now the structure looked like a tall, narrow, upright box with a door. Instead of a lock, which Tanner suspected would have taken too long to install, he simply took a short, very thick piece of wood from the tool kit and screwed it into the equally thick edge of one wall. When he twisted the chunk of wood sideways, it barred the door from opening every bit as effectively as a lock.
    The cuckoo clock struck the hour of eight. Tanner was astonished. She had been watching him work for two hours? Two hours?
    And Silly hadn’t arrived. Tanner was sure no one had come up the walk. There would have been movement on the screen. She would have noticed it.
    So he hadn’t been lying. Something had happened to Silly. An accident? What, she’d burned her arm on the oven? Slipped on a freshly mopped floor and thrown her back out? Cut her hand on a glass that broke when she was drying it?
    It had to be something like that. Couldn’t be anything worse.
    But how did he know about the accident, whatever it was? Had he been watching the house, like one of those stalkers that seemed to be constantly on the news lately? And seen Silly hurrying off to a doctor with her burned elbow