Half sobbing, Jeff did his best to tell Collins what had happened that evening, from the time he'd started talking to Linda Harris until the moment hours later when he'd suddenly, without thinking about it, struck his mother. But in the end he knew the story didn't make much sense-there were a lot of blank spots, times when he couldn't remember where he'd been or what he'd been doing. To his relief, the coach didn't seem too upset by what he'd done.
"Sounds to me like you just had an overreaction to breaking up with your girlfriend," he said. "Happens all the time with kids your age-hormones are flying all over your body and you never know what they're going to do to you. Tell you what," he went on. "I'll call Marty Ames and we'll take you out there and have him look you over. Believe me," he added with a wink, "if you're cracking up, Marty will be able to spot it in a minute. But you're not," he added quickly, as Jeff paled. "I'll bet he says the same thing I just said."
"But what about my folks?" Jeff asked, his voice anxious. "After what I did to my mom, my dad's going to kill me!"
"No, he's not," Collins assured him. "If we need to, I'll talk to him, or Marty Ames will. But I'll bet we won't even have to do that. Your old man's pretty proud of you, Jeff. And he's sure not going to turn against you now. He's not, and your mom's not."
As Jeff seemed to calm down, the coach went to the phone and made a quick call. A quarter of an hour later, with Jeff sitting next to him, Collins pulled his car to a stop in front of the clinic gates and rolled the window down to speak to the guard who was waiting for them. The guard pressed a remote control and the front gates swung slowly inward to let Collins drive through.
Martin Ames was waiting for them in the lobby of the sprawling main building and immediately led Jeff back to the examination room. "Strip down to your shorts," he told the frightened boy, "and let's have a look at you." He turned to Collins. "Tell me what happened." While Jeff peeled off his clothes, Collins briefly repeated what Jeff had told him earlier. "Okay," Ames said when Collins was done. "Let's get started."
It was as Ames began checking the reflexes in his legs, tapping his knees with the small rubber mallet, that the rage suddenly began to build in Jeff again. He could feel it coming on but could do nothing about it. And yet there was no reason for it-he'd been through this procedure hundreds of times before and it had never bothered him. But not this time.
This time it infuriated him.
"Stop that, goddamn it!" he shouted. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Kicking the tiny mallet in Ames's hand aside, Jeff jumped off the examination table, his eyes blazing with fury, his hands clenching into fists.
Ames took a quick step backward and glanced at Collins, who instantly threw his arms around Jeff in a powerful bear hug. In the brief moment before Jeff could recover from the sudden action, Ames jabbed his arm with a hypodermic needle and pressed the plunger. Jeff froze in Collins's grasp, and as the drug began to take effect, felt his rage ease and his body relax. As Collins released him, Jeff sank back onto the treatment table.
The last thing he heard as he drifted into unconsciousness was the sound of Ames's voice telling Collins to call his parents and explain to them where he was. He was going to be all right, Ames said, but he would have to spend the rest of the night at the clinic.
But was he going to be all right?
Martin Ames didn't know.
He knew it was a nightmare, knew it had to be. Surely what was happening to him couldn't be real.
His entire body was racked with pain, blinding, searing-pain that tore at the depths of his soul.
He seemed to be surrounded by darkness, and yet, even in the pitch-black of the torture chamber, he could see perfectly.
He was not alone.
He could see the others, some of them chained to the walls, others strapped to the rack in the center of the floor. And he could hear their cries-agonized shrieks that bellowed from the depth of their souls, reverberating through the stone room but never fading away, only being built upon by more screams, more pitiful wails.
The chamber masters were there, too, oblivious to the keening pleas of their victims, each of them carrying a different tool of torture. One of them was approaching Jeff now, a red-hot branding iron balanced delicately in his hands. He seemed to smile at Jeff for a moment, and through the cacophony, Jeff almost imagined he could hear the man laugh before he pressed the glowing metal against his thigh.
The sweet smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils then, his gorge rising as a wave of nausea swept over him. "Nooo!"
Creature he wailed, and his whole body jerked and thrashed against the chains that bound him to the metal table on which he lay. "Nooo!"
It was his own scream that finally released him from the grip of the terrible dream, and he sat bolt upright.
A blinding stream of white light shone in his eyes. He blinked several times and his vision began to clear.
He was breathing hard; his lungs felt as if they might explode as he gasped for air.
There were people around him, and for a moment the dream closed around him again and he opened his mouth to scream out once more. But then he caught hold of himself.
They weren't the torturers. These men were real, and they wore white coats-as white as the room in which he sat.
Hospital.
He was in a hospital.
Then, slowly, it came back to him, and as his memory returned in bits and pieces, he began to calm down.
He was at the sports clinic. The coach had brought him here, and Dr. Ames was taking care of him. So he was going to be all right.
He looked around now.
There were three attendants, three men he recognized immediately.
They were part of the staff; his friends.
But they were looking at him strangely, almost as if afraid of him.
He raised his hand to shield his eyes against the brilliance of the light, and it was then that he saw the leather strap.
It was buckled tightly around his wrist, but the free end was torn and ragged, almost as if…
As if he'd been strapped down and managed somehow to rip himself free.
He swallowed hard and felt a soreness in his throat, the kind of rawness he always felt after he'd spent an afternoon shouting at a football game.
Puzzled, he tried to swing his legs off the table and sit up straight, but found that he couldn't. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that his ankles, too, were wrapped in leather straps.
Just as in the nightmare, he was bound to a metal table.
A wave of anger built up inside him, and he gathered himself together to jerk his legs free.
Once more a needle was plunged into his arm and he quickly felt himself sink back into the strange, soft darkness of unconsciousness.
Mercifully, the nightmare did not come back to haunt him.
Chapter Eight
Mark Tanner woke up early the next morning, but instead of rolling over to catch an extra ten minutes of sleep, he threw the covers off, sat up and stretched. AsChivas gazed curiously at him from his place next to the bed, he dropped to the floor and began doing push-ups, his resolve of the night before still strong within him. He kept at it, grunting with the exertion, until his arms ached. Then, though he knew it was impossible for his body to have changed yet, he glanced in the mirror. But this morning, instead of being depressed by what he saw, he only grinned at himself encouragingly. "It'll work," he muttered. "If it worked for Robb, it'll work for me, too."
"What'll work?" he heard Kelly's voice ask.
Flushing beet red, he spun around to see his sister staring at him from the door. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "If my door's closed, you're not supposed to come in."
"I had to go to the bathroom," Kelly replied, as if that explained everything. "You were making funny noises. Are you sick?"
"Don't be dumb," Mark told her. "If I were sick, wouldn't I be in bed? Now get out of here, or I'll tell Mom you came into my room without knocking." Of course he knew he wouldn't, but he also knew the threat would be enough to send Kelly scuttling back to her own room.