Sanctum (9 page)

“Yeah,” he said, setting his jaw. “Didn’t you say that this Professor Reyes was teaching a seminar? That’s the one I want to see.”

Chapter 11

“R
unning late,” the text message from Jordan read, “be @ dinner in 5.”

Dan sat alone at one of the long, glistening cafeteria tables, Felix’s photo tucked surreptitiously in the shadow of his tray. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Abby, who was just now hovering at the cereal dispenser, tapping her forefinger on her lower lip while she decided between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Corn Pops. It was cute the way she felt comfortable eating breakfast for dinner, even tonight, when other high schoolers might be more concerned with impressing the college students.

Dan heard a soft voice behind him, and he might have thought it was Abby’s if he wasn’t still looking right at her. But the voice, he realized, couldn’t be hers anyway. It was too low, too breathy, too monotone.

“Daniel, Daniel, come out and play. . . .” It was like a song, a child’s rhyme. “Come out and play, won’t you come out to play, Daniel, Daniel. . . .”

He twisted, fast, following the sound of the voice, an angry shout dying in the back of his throat. Tucked in the corner, hidden from view by the shadow of the dessert station, was a little boy, seemingly abandoned. Frantic, Dan glanced in every direction. Nobody else saw him—thin, maybe nine or ten years old, dressed in a striped sweater and torn, too-short pants. It looked like the top of his head was lumpy, almost misshapen, and
bleeding
.

The little boy was clasping something hard in his hands, holding it tight to his chest. His eyes bugged, hollow and empty like Doug’s, like—

“Dan?” Abby sat down across from him, frowning. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She laughed, but Dan could hardly breathe enough to respond.

“Do you . . . Is there a boy in the corner?” he whispered. “Is there a boy behind me in the corner? A little one—striped sweater. Funny pants.”

“Um, no, I don’t think so.” And then indulgently, “Let me check.” Abby hoisted herself up, looking over his shoulder for a long, tense moment. She lowered herself back to the bench and politely cleared her throat. “There’s nothing there, Dan. Well, maybe like a wrapper or two, but not a little boy. Are you
seeing
things now?”

Yes
.

“No.” Dan swatted haphazardly at the sweat popping out on his forehead. “I mean, I’m just starving. Are you starving? I’m
starving
.”

He glanced at the photo under his tray. Jesus, the little kid had looked just like the one in the picture.

“It’s not like I’m going to judge,” she said, taking up a spoon. “Remember? I’m hearing voices? None of us are exactly in tip-top mental shape at the moment. If you are seeing things, you have to tell us.”

“You win. I
am
, all right? There was a boy standing right behind me, and I heard him singing some kind of nursery rhyme, only it had my name in it.” But it wasn’t his name, not really. Nobody called him Daniel. “God . . .” He shook his head, scrambling the ten different thoughts all warring for dominance (
I shouldn’t have told her; of course I had to tell her
, etc.). “This place is some kind of collegiate Bermuda Triangle.”

“Hey,” she said. Abby’s warm hand reached across the table and closed around his. The tiny squeeze she gave his wrist almost made him forget where they were. For a second they were just two normal teenagers. Boyfriend and girlfriend, having dinner. “Even if it is, we’ll find a way out.”

“Thanks, Abby, I . . . That makes it better. You make it better.”

“Hey, kiddos, buckle up—I’ve brought homework!” Jordan arrived in a burst of busy energy, sitting down hard next to Dan before shifting a two-foot-tall stack of newspapers, almanacs, and books onto the table. “Oof. Man, those were heavy.”

“What’s all this?” Abby asked, taking back her hand so she could eat her cereal.

“Couldn’t get that damn picture out of my head,” Jordan explained quickly, divvying up the stack of stuff evenly into three piles. The rain had splattered and streaked his glasses. “And I also needed an excuse to ditch Cal. So I thought, okay, why not see if we can dig up more on the carnival? I hit up the library and smooth-talked the kid working the front desk to let me take a peek in the archives. I figured someone must have written about the carnival back in the twenties, right?”

Crunching an apple, Jordan pushed his copy of the addresses across the table. Already, a print of a local map waited underneath, with each of the coordinates circled in red ink.

“There’s tons of stuff in there about what was going on in Camford last time the carnival was here, plus stuff about the carnival itself.”

“Wow,” Dan said. “Nice work.”

“Eh, it was nothing.” He shrugged. “It’s easier to stay busy. If I just sit around it’s like my mind starts to, I don’t know, implode or something. Busy is better.”

The top folder on Jordan’s pile teemed with photographs and news clippings—so many, in fact, that the bottom seam of the folder had started to tear. Dan carefully plucked the file off the stack and opened it, watching a cascade of old pictures spread out onto the table. He glanced through one after another. . . . Bearded ladies, muscle men, a tightrope walker, a carousel. Ghostly remnants of a happier time in Camford, before it had been marred by the warden’s legacy.

“There’s, um, been another development, too,” Abby said. She nodded toward Dan, a gentle prompting that made him feel both sheepish and protected. They were his friends. He had to trust them.

“She’s right. It’s . . . It’s weird to admit, but I’m starting to
see
things. Well, just the one thing so far, so maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’ll stop at that.”

“Whoa.” Jordan slowly lowered his half-eaten apple to the table. “What kind of things? Er, thing?”

“A little boy,” Dan replied. Automatically, he pictured the kid again and shivered. “But he looked . . . old, like he was from another time. The weird thing is, he looked like the kid in the picture Felix gave me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“Yikes. That is some M. Night Shamalamadingdong shit.” Jordan took another bite of the apple, but slowly this time. With a full mouth he added, “Do you think it’s stress, maybe? Or the lack of sleep? Are you sure it was . . . Are you
sure
you weren’t hallucinating?”

“Well, I guess not,” Dan murmured. “He was singing my name at me, and it reminded me of that Doug kid, the way he just said my name over and over again. So maybe I was thinking of that and conjured up the kid from the photo?”

“I keep hearing Lucy,” Abby confessed, chewing her lip. Her hair was still damp from the rain. “It’s getting worse. It’s like being here is . . . accelerating something. I’m hearing her all the time now.” She took Dan’s wrist again. “I’m not sure coming back was such a good idea. Maybe we should’ve left all of this alone.”

“We could still leave,” Jordan said, losing interest in his apple. “If you guys really don’t think we should be here . . .”

“No,” Dan said. His eyes rested on the photo, focusing on the pale, strange little boy in the image. “We have to start tracking down those addresses. Tonight.”

“Okay then,” Jordan said. He took a newspaper off the top of his stack and opened it, getting down to work. “Tonight. Before we lose it altogether.”

Chapter 12

D
an couldn’t hear his own thoughts over the
THUMP-WUB-THUMP
of the bass. If this was what hanging out with friends was like in college, he’d take a book, a chai latte, and a quiet corner in the library, thank you very much.

“It’s like the stereo is inside my head!” he shouted at Jordan as they stood in the cramped, sweaty foyer.

“Yeah!” Jordan screamed back. “Isn’t it fantastic?”

Well, there was no accounting for taste. The police would probably show up any second to break up the party. What sort of neighbors wouldn’t complain about noise this loud?

Dan turned a full circle, trying to spot Abby among the sea of heads bobbing along to the music. It didn’t help that he couldn’t remember what she was wearing. He hadn’t changed from earlier, but he’d turned up in the quad at nine to find that literally every other person going in their group—Abby, Jordan, Micah, Lara, and Cal—had done something large or small to freshen up or completely change their appearance.

Lara had worn a pair of high-waisted denim cutoffs over purple tights. The dye job on the shorts made them look like a rainbow, something that he pointed out trying to make conversation, only to have her rebut coldly that it was “
ombre
, not rainbow.” She managed not to freeze to death outside by wearing a huge, bulky coat over everything. It reminded Dan vaguely of a flasher.

Heads half-glued together, Abby and Lara had engaged in rapid-fire chitchat as they all hurried across campus. Both girls had dark hair, and Abby had braided hers into about ten different designs and pinned it up in a sort of starburst. She’d looked amazing, and Dan had wished he was seeing her all dressed up under circumstances where they could actually enjoy themselves. Instead, they would be spending the night skulking around in the dark. But then, he might not even be doing that much with her if the first time they ever met had been under better circumstances.