Shadow Hills (2 page)

“Never mind.” He shook his head. “You know, I was going for irrepressible—sometimes it comes off more like asshole-ish. I should work on that.”

“One to ten on the asshole scale?” I looked at Graham, sizing him up. “I’d say you’re about a two.”

“Thanks. Actually … wait. Is ten the biggest asshole or is one?”

I smiled at him knowingly.

“Okay.” He nodded. “I see how it’s gonna be.”

We came to a stop in front of a brick building with white stone moldings around the windows. It looked even older than the main office, and some of the gray roof shingles had a slight greenish cast.

“Well, here we are. Kresky Hall.” Graham opened the door for me.

To the right of the entrance was a lobby area that I guessed was the floor’s common room. There was a plaid couch in front of
a flat-screen TV, and along the wall was a counter with a refrigerator at one end. A vending machine was shoved in the back corner.

Graham saw me eyeing the selection of sodas, chips, and what I assumed were
very
stale sandwiches. He said, “It’s not exactly a four-star restaurant, but it’s better than nothing when you get hungry and the cafeteria is closed.”

I nodded my tentative agreement. I would have to be really hungry to risk getting food poisoning from an old tuna-salad sandwich.

“The first room on the first floor of every residence is always the house parent’s. The Kresky Hall house mistress is Angela Moore, but I saw her in the Admin Building earlier, so she’s probably not here.” Graham knocked twice on her door, got no response, then looked at a scrap of paper in his hand.

“Room one-sixteen. You’re on the left at the end of the hall.”

As we walked, he fiddled with his keys, pulling one of them off the ring. He handed it to me when we reached my door.

“So here you are. Safe and sound.” Graham took a few steps back toward the entrance, then stopped and turned to me. “Hey, it’s kind of quiet before everyone arrives. Do you want to do something tonight?”

It was the final Saturday of the summer. Usually I’d be going to a huge party to celebrate our last two nights of freedom before school began. But that wasn’t how my life was anymore.

“We could go into town when I get off work,” he went on. “I can show you around Shadow Hills—I mean, it’s no L.A., but at least we could grab some non-dorm food.”

“That sounds good.” I felt a flutter in my stomach. It was a nice, kind of nervous feeling, exciting and somehow reassuring.

“Cool. I’m usually done around six. If you want, I can text you when I’m finishing up.” We exchanged numbers, and with a little half wave Graham headed back down the hall and was gone.

I put my key in the lock and turned. The door swung open to reveal my new room. There was a bedside table against the left wall, with a twin bed next to it. A desk was on the right wall, bare except for a small metal lamp. I closed the door behind me and discovered it had been hiding a closet and narrow chest of drawers.

The gleaming white walls were almost blinding. I tried to ignore the pungent chemical odor of fresh paint. I set my backpack down on the bed and unzipped it, pulling out a green journal and a pen. I flipped past my sister’s early entries to where I’d recorded my dreams. I added another hatch mark to the top of the cell/graveyard page.

New details: names on the gravestones and a strange guy. Plus, this one came at 3:33 p.m. as opposed to the usual 3:33 a.m
. I hastily scribbled my notes, feeling stupid for assigning such significance to a dream. So Athena had been having the dreams, too—it didn’t mean anything.

But even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t true. The time itself seemed noteworthy. Three, after all, was a mystical number: the Holy Trinity, the three jewels of Buddhism, the pyramids.

I looked at the hatch marks again. I’d had the graveyard dream for the ninth time—three times three. I could just be
grasping at straws, trying to make sense of something that didn’t mean anything.

Well, I knew one thing for sure, the dreams weren’t going to be stopped by a change of scenery. In fact, this dream seemed more vivid than the others. I could almost hear my old shrink’s “I told you so” tone of voice. You’d think for the amount of money my parents paid him, he could at least have come up with some original phrasing for his hackneyed advice. “You can’t run away from your problems” had been his exact words when I brought in the brochure for Devenish Prep. The brochure that had arrived for Athena six months too late.

The sharp grief hit me like it always did when I allowed myself to think about my sister. Right after it happened, the pain had been unbearable. The enduring loneliness almost devoured me. Even after thirteen months it still felt like I had been hit in the chest with a sandbag when I walked by Athena’s room. Though it looked the same, the room
felt
so different … hollow and torn open. It was no longer my sister’s sanctuary; it had become a cavernous wound.

I opened the journal to a heavily creased page; I’d book-marked it with an envelope that had the Devenish Prep crest embossed on it. When I saw that envelope addressed to Athena after she was already gone—after the police had shown up, after I picked out a dress for her funeral, after I said good-bye at her grave—I thought I’d have a breakdown right there in front of my family’s mailbox. And then I’d found her diary…. When I read about her dreams, so like my own, it shook me to the core.
She wrote of a recurring dream about a place she’d never been before. A place with old redbrick buildings. A place that she finally identified as a boarding school in Shadow Hills. When I had read that, everything became crystal clear to me. I wanted to feel that clarity again. I scanned to the end of the entry, to the last words my sister had written in her diary:

The nightmares are so vivid now I’m afraid to sleep. I feel my energy dragging constantly. I’m a walking zombie. I have to find a way to go to Devenish Prep; maybe there I’ll be able to figure this out
.

I ran my thumb over the fading navy-blue ink. There was something at Devenish. I could feel it in my bones. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I was going to find out. I owed that to Athena.

It hadn’t been that hard to convince my parents to send me to Devenish—in fact, they were probably happier without the reminder. My dark blond hair and green eyes, my slight build and heart-shaped face—the features I’d always been so happy to share with my amazing older sister—were now tarnished. I couldn’t look into a mirror without a part of me feeling like Athena was there staring back. It was comforting, but it was also awful, like salt in a wound.

Hot tears needled at the corners of my eyes, but I pushed them down. There was no sense in crying in my dorm room. I had gotten here a day earlier than most of the students so I could “settle into a structured routine.” My shrink had told my parents it would be best for me, and I was happy to have a little time to check the place out before everyone else started arriving.

But before I could go poking around, I had to change. I felt seriously conspicuous in my uniform. As I unzipped my skirt, I noticed a bright red mark just below my left hip. Drawing down my waistband, I looked to see if I had a bite or something, but there was nothing on my skin except for a small curved line that resembled a crescent moon. I rubbed my finger across the mark, wondering how I’d gotten it. Something about it gave me a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Once I’d slipped on some worn-in jeans, a shrunken Clash T-shirt, and my old checkerboard Vans, I felt much better.

I was about to be on my way when I remembered that I was supposed to hang out with Graham later. I grabbed my makeup case out of my bag and went to look for the bathroom so I could freshen up.

It was easy to locate the open doorway in the center of the hall.

After I put my toothbrush back in my toiletries bag, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Apparently my hair was not going to take well to the Massachusetts humidity. It had gone from straight and sleek to wavy with uncontrollable body. I pulled it into a high ponytail, then headed back to the dorm room to get my purse and lock up.

I filled my lungs with the pristine, smog-free air as I took in the campus. The sprawling grounds were shockingly green, with rolling hills and a blue-tinged ridge of mountains in the distance. For every group of four or five buildings, there was a large open quad with flagstone paths crossing in a diamond pattern. My
school in L.A. had been much smaller; this place looked more like a college than a high school. The grass was freshly cut, and without city smells getting in the way, I could actually pick up on its sharp, citrusy aroma.

There was a crescent of woods at the edge of campus, and impossibly huge trees dotted the grounds. They looked perfect for relaxing under, their thick crawling roots forming natural steps to sit on. Green ivy clung to the sides of almost all the buildings, reminding me of seaweed wrapped around my ankles in the ocean.

It really was a pretty place, with the “historical university” look, but I didn’t know if I would ever get used to it. I preferred the garish pink apartment buildings of West Hollywood, the Melrose area bungalows, the birds-of-paradise at my old house in Los Feliz.

As I walked the rocky gray paths that wound in and around the school, I noticed a distinctive building up on a hill. It looked to be about a mile away. I started toward it, drawn by the imposing white stone walls and grand stature. When I got nearer, I could see the stone was marred by several decades’ worth of green water-damage stains. A strange familiarity washed over me when I came to a stop in front of the building. It was tall and thick—a fortress. The parking lot next to it seemed strange and out of place, the modern ambulances and new cars in stark contrast to the old-fashioned architecture.

I wasn’t surprised to see a historical plaque near the front entrance; the place looked like it was hundreds of years old.
I quickly scanned the metal script:
SHADOW HILLS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
…
BEST DIAGNOSTIC UNIT IN THE U.S.
…
ORIGINALLY AN ALMSHOUSE IN THE
1700
S
…

I noticed a discreet sign that had been placed next to the plaque.
YOU ARE INVITED TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SHADOW HILLS HOSPITAL. PLEASE VISIT OUR HISTORY MUSEUM LOCATED TO THE LEFT OF THE FRONT LOBBY
.

The flash of a dark shape caught my peripheral vision. My nerves clattered like cans dragged across asphalt, and I turned to see the shadow streak across the grounds and disappear behind the hospital. Without thinking, I followed it around the corner.

The building seemed to go on forever, becoming less weathered and more contemporary as I walked. After a few minutes, I reached a large courtyard. There were several dirt paths winding through patches of overgrown gardens and continuing back into a dense stand of tall trees. Instinctively, I followed the central trail leading into the woods.

There were several patients in hospital gowns milling around and talking to doctors dressed in scrubs. It made me feel a little safer just knowing there were people nearby. I could call out if I got into trouble, and as long as I stuck to the main path, I probably wouldn’t get lost. I had always prided myself on having an excellent sense of direction.

Green ferns carpeted the earth beneath my feet, and the air felt cool and wet. Soon I came upon a dilapidated iron fence. The gate lay on the ground, and judging by the snaking vines that entwined it, it had fallen from its rusty hinges long ago.

My heart pounded with a strange mix of dread and excitement.
Once you cross that threshold, there’s no turning back
. I didn’t know where the thought had come from, but there was no way I could leave now. I wouldn’t allow myself to be a coward. Cautiously, I stepped through the entrance.

The trees opened up into a circular plot of exposed land. My hands were suddenly cold as ice. Directly in front of me were the ghostly ruins of an ancient graveyard.

My breath caught in my throat, and my vision swam. This place wasn’t
like
the graveyard in my dream: it
was
the graveyard in my dream.

It was filled with both upright and flat gravestones—the standing ones broken and crumbling; the ledger stones flush with the ground, overgrown by weeds and tendrils of ivy. The vertical slabs tilted toward and away from one another at different angles, the result of one side or the other sinking deeper into the earth over time. It gave the impression of a foul set of teeth: green and rotting, crooked and overcrowded, jabbing out in all directions with gaps where the ledger stones were.

I edged closer to the first row of tightly packed graves. It looked so familiar that it sent a tremor through my body. The stones that were flush with the ground were small and plain, with just a name and death year. The majority of the upright gravestones were similarly unadorned, though a few had an eerie skull with wings at the top. The markers were obviously very old—some so weathered that the engravings had been completely rubbed away, while others were obscured by the moss clinging to them.

I squatted down and ran my hand over one of the slabs that still had discernible carvings on it:
ANNABELLE MARTIN
, 1690–1736.

I stood back up and wound my way through the maze of stones, inspecting all the ones bearing inscriptions.
GEORGE COOPER
, 1704–1736.
ESTHER GARRETT
, 1712–1736.
JOHN CATCH-POOL
, 1693–1736. My hands tingled as the blood flowed through them, warm and urgent.
HERBERT HICKS
, 1715–1736.
ELIZABETH CHURCH
, 1719–1736.

A sick feeling slithered through my insides when I saw the next headstone. It held two names and sets of dates:
RUTH MOORE
, 1707–1736, and
RACHEL MOORE
, 1709–1736.

They were buried in the same plot
. I checked the next row and the next; it seemed the more I looked, the more there were. Dozens of headstones with as many as three or four names on them.
Almost like the mass graves of the bubonic plague
.