Rhymes With Witches (26 page)

“Are we going in or not?” Camilla said.

“Chill,” I said. A breeze shook the leaves in the trees, making a dry rustling sound that made me think of bones. The building was right there, only yards away, but my legs stayed planted where they were. It was as if my body knew something that I didn't.

The wind rose, ruffling my hair, and I quick stepped forward to the basement door. I did a fancy move with the jade comb, and the door sprang open. Although it would have anyway, since the door wasn't bolted. My lock-picking was just for show.

“Well?” Camilla said.

I took off my heels—too loud—and shoved them into my backpack. Then I slipped barefoot into the unlit building. The yellow on my vest was dimly visible, and Camilla eyed it again and blew air out of her mouth.

“I can't believe you wore that to school,” she said.

“What? I never wore this to school.”

Camilla gazed at me. “We
are
at school.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Third floor—that's where Lurl's office allegedly is, right?” she said. She marched down the hall. “We better get a move on.”

Ceiling-level fire alarms shone faintly, casting an eerie red light over the rows of lockers. In the stairwells, moonlight streamed in from square windows. What looked normal by day was claustrophobic by night, full of hungry shadows stretching
toward us as we padded toward Lurl's office. Or as I padded, rather. Camilla walked normally, spine erect and arms swinging. I admired her for it even as I resented it.

On the third floor, I banged my shin against what turned out to be a wire Animal Control cage. “Fuck,” I said. Pain bloomed under my skin, and I paused to massage my muscle. Camilla stopped, too, turning around when she realized I was no longer with her, and in the sudden quiet I heard a scrabbly sound. Like claws tic-tacking across the floor.

Clamminess squeezed my insides. “Do you hear that?” I whispered.

“Hear what?” Camilla said in her normal voice.

“Shhh,”
I said. I strained my ears, but the noise was gone. We continued on. We reached the corridor that connected the north hall to the south hall, and looking at the heavy door, I was again hit with foreboding. I didn't want to go on.

Camilla exhaled impatiently.

I tugged it open, and we stepped into the dark passageway. This section had neither windows not fire alarms, so when the door thunked shut behind us, we were thrown into black. My body went rigid.

“Open it back,” Camilla said beside me. Her voice slipped higher up the register. “I can't see a thing.”

I scrambled for the handle. At first I couldn't find it, and my panic mounted. Then my fingers found purchase, and I pushed the door open to let in a sliver of gray.

“Use your shoe to prop it,” Camilla said.

“Use
your
shoe,” I said, still feeling freaked and hoping it didn't show. But my shoes, safe in my backpack, were delicate silver sling-backs. Hers were some weird kind of sneakers involving velour.

She made as if to return to the main hall. “Fine. Guess it's not that important to you after all.”

“Wait,” I said. I fumbled in my pack, pushing my shoes aside, and grasped the teddy bear. I jammed it between the door and the frame.

The corridor was still dark, but not
as
dark, and the quality of the light gave the night a kind of dreamlike unreality. I hesitated, then walked to Lurl's office. I really didn't want to do this, but I had the dreadful sense that it was the only way.

I drew the key from my pack. “Okay,” I said. “Here goes.”

“Here goes nothing,” Camilla said.

I turned the key in the lock. I twisted the knob.

A yowl pierced the air, and a mass of fur and muscle drove into my chest. I yelped and tried to get it off me, but its claws dug into my quilted vest.

“Help!” I cried. I pried one paw free, only to have the cat latch back on and climb higher on my shoulder. “Camilla!
Do
something!”

The cat howled. I shoved. Digging my hands under its front legs, I flung it to the floor. It scrambled to its feet and trotted back over. It meowed and butted my leg. A rumbling purr started up in its chest.

“He likes you,” Camilla said.

I breathed hard and examined my vest, now scratched and ripped. “This would have been my skin,” I said. “I would have been, like, shredded.”

Camilla strode into Lurl's office and flicked on the lights. One of the bulbs popped and went out, leaving us in half-lit dusk.

“So where's the great mystery?” she said, scanning the barren room. “You better not have dragged me here just for this.”

I moved forward, but the cat twined between my legs and made me trip.

“Goddammit,” I said.

The cat stretched on its hind feet and attempted to scale me. I winced as it pawed my bruised shin.

“Quit it. I mean it—quit it!”

“I don't see anything,” Camilla said. She turned to leave.

“Will you just give me a minute?” I snapped. I shook the cat from my leg and tugged the J pendant out of my pack. I jerked the cord, and the J danced. The cat meowed and batted it with its paw.

“You want this?” I said. “Huh?” I dangled the pendant down low and dragged it across the floor. I slung it down the hall, and the cat skittered after it. I closed the door.

“Okay,” I said. “All right.”

“All right, what?” Camilla said.

I pointed to the office's rear door, the one that led to what I knew must be an empty storage room. Or who knows, maybe not so empty. “In there. It's got to be.”

“
What's
got to be?” she said. But she crossed the room, and I followed. For a moment, she wavered. Then she opened the door.

“Holy shit,” she said.

My blood reversed directions in my veins. Staring from the shadows were corpses, mute and still. Then my brain caught on, and I realized they weren't corpses—of course not corpses, why had I thought corpses?—but lifesize goddess figures. The room was packed with them. A rough stone goddess with arms out-spread stood by a marble goddess with a swollen belly. A black Aphrodite. A lifesize Kali, goddess of death and resurrection, with her ever-present string of skulls around her neck.

“What the hell … ?” I whispered. The light filtering in from Lurl's office wasn't much, but as my eyes began to adjust, I made out bits and bobs of brightness in the gloom. A butterfly barrette sparkled from an ivory snake goddess. A tiny mirror was tucked among the skulls on the figure of Kali. A heavy-breasted goddess held Alicia's lip balm in her upturned limestone palm.

“Do you believe me now?” I asked. “Can we get out of here?”

Camilla was pale.

“That's my headband,” she said. She snatched a creamy suede headband from a statue sculpted to look like the Egyptian goddess Isis. “And that's my necklace! I looked everywhere for that necklace!” She ripped a chain off the tip of a crescent moon, which an alabaster goddess lifted to the heavens.

“Camilla,” I said. “Come on, don't mess it up.”

She stared at me incredulously. She strode across the room,
careless of the offerings she knocked out of place, and reclaimed a silver bracelet. From its links dangled a heart-shaped charm, etched with a B for ballet.

“Stop,” I pleaded. “This isn't cool.”

“Is there anything else?” she demanded.

I thought of the bobby pin. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“There's nothing else, I swear.”

We heard a noise, and both of our heads swung toward the source. There. A stain in the darkness.

Camilla rejoined me in a series of jackrabbit steps. The Isis figure tottered as she passed, and a collection of bracelets clinked to the floor.

“What's over there?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “How should I know?”

Our voices were strained.

“Go look,” she said.

“What?
You
go look.”

We stared into the shadowy corner. A shape shifted almost imperceptibly. There was a muted thump.

My heart rose in my throat, and I whispered, “Where's the light? There's got to be a light for this room, too.” I turned from the shape and found the switch. I flicked it, but nothing happened.

“It's a cradle,” Camilla said.

I faced it again. Terror fluttered in my chest.

“Go look,” she commanded. “Or I will.”

Everything inside me grew dizzy, and I blamed her. Who was she to throw out a dare? Who was she to imply that she was the one in charge?

I forced my feet to move. The goddess figures seemed to watch me as I approached—it was like being in a room filled with menacing strangers—and the air grew unpleasantly warm. I smelled cat shit and old pee. I stepped closer, and the shape in the corner gained definition. Yes. A cradle, small and worn. A thump as its rockers met the floor.

I peered inside.

A litter of kittens nuzzled against their mother, kneading her torso, butting their heads on her abdomen, suckling her belly.

No.

Not suckling.

A kitten shifted its body, and I saw a flap of the mother's fur. Another kitten tugged at the flap, and it came off way too easily. Tiny teeth dug into the flesh below.

My eyes strayed higher, and I spotted the incision across the mother's neck. I must have cried out, because a snow white kitten lifted its head and looked at me. Its pupils were vertical slits. It returned to lapping the clotted blood, and a littermate nosed closer, eager for its share. The cradle rocked harder. A thump and a thump. And under the thumping, something else. A growl, low and menacing. It seemed to come from the walls.

I stumbled back the way I had come. “Let's go,” I said.
“Now.”

I fled Lurl's temple and retreated through the outer office. I knew I should go back and put everything in order, but all I wanted was to be gone. Gone, gone, gone—and away from what I wished I'd never seen.

“Could you maybe speed it up just the tiniest bit?” I said. I jiggled from foot to foot. Camilla was too far behind me.

“Could you maybe relax?” she retorted. “This was your idea, in case you've forgotten.”

She flipped off Lurl's light and followed me into the hall. She slammed the door behind us.

In the Range Rover, the reality of what I'd done sunk in.

“You can't tell anyone,” I told Camilla.

She pressed down on the accelerator. “Who would I tell?”

“I'm serious. What you saw is, like, top secret. I will be in so much trouble if you blab.”

She didn't respond. I hadn't articulated what I'd seen in the cradle, and I wasn't about to. But the rest—the goddess figures, the offerings, the low growl which Camilla must have heard—that knowledge alone was enough to make Camilla dangerous.

My fingers found the ripped part of my vest and closed around it. I tried to think without freaking out. I tried to think how to make this all be okay.

“And don't worry about … you know,” I said. “Because I'm
going to fix things. Fix them for you, I mean. I'll tell Bitsy that she can't steal from you anymore—but only if you promise not to mess things up.”

She glanced at me skeptically.

“Plus, now you know to be on the lookout, so she wouldn't be able to steal from you even if she tried.” I lifted my chin. “So you pretty much owe me.”

She pulled up in front of my house. She gazed out the driver's side window.

“Why does she hate me so much?” she asked.

“What? She doesn't
hate
you. She just …” A prickle of heat spread on my neck. “She doesn't hate you.”

“You don't have to lie. Anyway, I hate her, too, so we're even.”

I fidgeted. They were hardly even.

“When you hate someone, you think about her all the time,” Camilla said. She traced a faint white line of bird shit on the other side of the window pane. “You become obsessed.”

Oh, just shut up,
I thought. But what I said was, “Well… that's all over, because like I said, I'm going to make it stop. It's all going to stop.”

She turned to face me.

“So do you promise you won't go tattling to the whole school?” I said. “Not that anyone would believe you.”

An opaque look appeared in her eyes, then slid away. She released her breath in a slow letting go. “I won't go tattling.”

I felt a tremendous gush of relief. Gratitude, even, despite the fact that she was the one who should feel grateful to me.