“Hey!” he called, running up to them. “Sorry . . . I, uh, I saw an attraction I wanted to check out. I didn’t mean to disappear on you guys like that.” The clown who had given him the tickets ambled by, sneering at them. “Jeez, they could’ve toned down the makeup on these guys. . . . It’s kinda sick.”
“Dan, you have to stop wandering off like that, we were freaking out,” Abby said, shaking her head. “I texted you like five times!”
He hadn’t thought to check his phone and hadn’t, he realized, even felt it buzz in his pocket. When he checked it now, he saw all five texts and sank down into his coat. “Seriously, I didn’t mean to worry you guys. There was just this tent—the one over there—and it looks exactly like the one from that photo.”
Abby was trying to hand him a bottle of water but she held on to it, watching as he produced the photo and held it up so his friends could make the comparison for themselves.
“Dan . . .” Jordan cleared his throat expectantly. “That’s a tree.”
Dan blinked hard, looking again at the picture and the tent. The . . . tent? The tree. Jordan was right. There was nothing there, just a blank patch of grass where Maudire’s tent ought to be.
“That’s not possible,” Dan insisted. “I was there. I was inside the tent. I talked to the hypnotist, Dr. Maudire! I swear, you guys, I’m not making this up. He was telling me about some password or fail-safe or something. I didn’t understand half of it.”
“Drink this, Dan,” Abby said, handing him the water. “You’re disoriented, maybe dehydrated.”
“He did say he was hallucinating before,” Jordan pointed out. “It sounds like it’s getting worse.”
“I didn’t say hallucinating. . . .” But there was no mistaking the absence of Maudire’s tent. All the protesting in the world wouldn’t change what he could now see plainly with his eyes. “I wouldn’t make this up.”
“And I don’t think you are,” Abby replied seriously. “I believe you, Dan, which makes it scarier in a way.”
“Not to butt in,” Jordan said quietly, elbowing them both, “but we’ve been spotted. Everyone look like you’re having the time of your effing lives before your buddy Micah has a seizure.”
Dan followed his friend’s gaze, seeing Micah through the crowd waving his entire arm at them.
“Let’s not get too wrapped up in conversation with him. We need to slip away and check out the addresses we have left.”
“If you’re not feeling well . . .”
“I’m okay now, Abby, I promise. Anyway, I want to ask him if he’s seen Cal,” Dan said. “For now just pretend we don’t know anything. I want to see how he reacts.”
Abby led the way to a volunteers’ table where students handed out little maps of the carnival and answered questions. A few of them were leading walking haunted tours of the campus and surrounding streets. Micah gestured them over to his end of the table, a little command center set up not far from the food vendors. Cal waded through the mass of people toward them, no longer dressed in red robes and a mask, although that didn’t prove anything. Lara was with him, and they had brought cups of cider.
It took Dan a moment to conjure up a fake smile. He avoided Cal’s eyes, staring straight at the shoes he had spotted just minutes before.
“Thanks,” Abby said, smiling brightly at Lara. “It’s freezing out here.”
“The last thing we need is some prospie dropping dead from frostbite,” Cal muttered.
Dan hoped his anger wasn’t showing too obviously on his face.
“Cal’s grumpy because I convinced him to come along,” Lara said. She was wearing one of the orange volunteer tees over a waffle-textured long-sleeve shirt. Her dark hair peeked out from under a chunky-knit pink hat with kitten ears perched on top.
“So what’s up with this haunted tour?” Abby asked, making conversation with Lara. Cal turned away to chat with some upperclassmen who were also waiting for the tours, and bumped Jordan with the big, overstuffed backpack he wore. It was so full the zipper was falling down of its own accord. Dan sipped his cider. It was watery, with a weird aftertaste.
“Oh, it’s pretty cool stuff, actually. . . .”
But Dan wasn’t listening.
“Come out and play, won’t you come out to play, Daniel, Daniel. . . .”
He turned a full circle, slowly, but he couldn’t find the source of the voice. It was the girl’s soft whisper calling to him again.
“Daniel . . . Daniel . . .”
Now it was coming from the other direction. He spun back around, but too fast, knocking into Abby. The cider cup flew out of her hands, splattering across Cal’s backpack.
“I’m so sorry!” she cried, darting forward. Lara jogged to the volunteer table and returned with a wad of napkins. Cal was already kneeling over his bag, though he didn’t wipe any of the cider off with his expensive-looking leather gloves.
“Here,” Abby said, grabbing the napkins and dabbing at the backpack. “It was an accident.”
Her hand knocked the bursting zipper and the bag finally gave up, cracking open. The edge of a tall, white binder fell out from inside the bag. Dan spotted a 19 on the spine just before papers scattered in every direction, exploding out from the binder and littering the ground like fallen leaves. Abby squeaked in surprise and started to gather up the papers, some of which were being blown away by the wind. She and Cal collected them all, and then Dan watched as she sheepishly handed them over.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make such a mess.”
Cal snatched up the bag protectively, shielding it with his arms.
“Forget it,” he muttered. “I’ll clean it up.”
As Cal stalked away, the stained backpack cradled in his arms like a baby, Dan tugged the others aside.
“You saw that, right? That binder . . . It was one of the missing ones. He has them.”
“And he was chasing you around in that maze?” Jordan let out a dark laugh. “What do you think he’s up to?”
“If he’s possessed like Felix was, he could be doing it for anyone, with no motive of his own,” Abby said despairingly.
“Either way, it does seem like all roads are leading straight to him,” Dan admitted. “We have to get those binders and see what’s inside.”
“That might be easier than you think,” she added with a sly grin. She pulled the edge of her coat open, revealing a dozen or so of the papers stashed inside.
“I am super into this kleptomaniac streak of yours,” Jordan said, laughing.
“Did you really think I spilled all over him by accident?” she asked. “I was hoping to see a cloak in his backpack, but no luck.”
“Hey! You guys want in on this next tour? There’s room!” It was Lara, returning with a fresh cup of cider for Abby. “How about it?”
“Sounds perfect!” Abby shuffled forward, then swung back around to face them. She shoved the stolen papers in Jordan’s direction. “Let’s stick to the back of the group,” she whispered. “The second we see an opening, we bolt.”
“Does anyone else think it’s weird that they’re not talking about Brookline? Like at all?” Jordan asked.
The tour guide, following the lantern-lit paths of the campus, brought them to a stop outside a house one block from the chapel. Everyone, including Dan, huddled over their cups of cider for warmth.
“The tour just started,” Abby pointed out in a whisper. “Give them a break.”
“Still . . .”
“No negatives about the school, remember?” Dan asked. “They start talking about Brookline, kids will Google it or ask questions and then they’re opening an industrial vat of worms. I bet they keep the whole thing PG.”
“Stand in front of me,” Jordan said. He had Abby’s ill-gotten archive papers in one hand and his phone, which he was using for light, in the other. “I want to see what was so worth stealing from the library. Wake me up if the tour gets interesting.”
Dan and Abby shifted to shield him from
the group. Micah and Lara stood up next to the tour guide, but they were whispering back and forth, apparently arguing, judging by the looks on their faces.
“This house belonged to a former president of the college,” the tour guide explained. She was short and stocky, with an athlete’s build and long, curly blond hair. Behind her, a well-kept white Victorian house practically glowed from the amount of candles lit inside it. “President Amos Van der Holt. He was beloved by the students, but he died young under mysterious circumstances. It’s said you can still see his shadow in the windows on November twenty-second, the day he died. The shadow always has a pipe, just like the one President Van der Holt smoked.”
Abby snorted. Compared to the things they’d seen the past few months, a ghost smoking a pipe would almost be a welcome sight.
The tour moved on down the block, then turned right, traveled another block, and turned right again. The houses here were starting to look familiar. Every few steps or so Jordan’s sneakers would collide with Dan’s as he searched through the archive pages, head bent over his work.
“Guys, this is Ellis Street,” Dan said. “The house from last night is right over there.”
“Okay, now I’m creeped out,” Jordan murmured, putting down the pages. “Good job, tour, you got me. What if they stop at that house?”
“Then we listen,” Abby said, holding her cider right up under her chin. Dan could smell the cinnamon-spiked steam as it rose around her face. “And then we find a way to break off and get to the other houses. We’re running out of time.”
Sure enough, the group stopped just at the foot of the familiar paved driveway that led up to the house.
The tour guide jabbed her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the house and glanced down at a set of note cards in her other hand. “This house has been empty for going on twenty years now, but it was once home to the Cartwrights and their son Harry. Harry served as Camford’s postmaster for six years, until 1971, when he was forced to resign. He became a suspect in the disappearance of several local women. . . .”
Dan squeezed his cup of cider a bit too hard; the Styrofoam creaked. He knew that name from his dreams—had, in fact, spoken to Harry Cartwright. No, the warden spoke to Harry Cartwright, not me.
“We found Caroline’s letter in that house and she explicitly mentioned meeting a man named Harry,” Abby whispered, pale even in the limited light washing over them. “Do you think she could have been one of the missing girls?”
“That’s my bet,” Jordan said. “If the secret society found out about her article and those letters she was sending, they would’ve wanted her to disappear. Here, look . . .” He discreetly held the papers from Cal’s backpack at waist height, highlighting the top page with his phone light. He pointed to a faded, almost completely indecipherable photo of a farmhouse. “The school papers had articles about those disappearances.”
“Well, on the bright side, maybe these papers were just in Cal’s binder because he needed them for the tour, for research,” Abby said. “I mean, he did help organize the carnival.”
“I have a really hard time believing that,” Dan muttered.
Several prospies crowded forward, huddling around the tour guide. “Did they ever find the missing people?” one asked.
“Can we go inside?” another shouted.
The tour guide tried to shrug off these questions with a smile, but she looked a little exasperated. Micah and Lara were still too lost in their discussion to be much help.
“Come on,” Abby said, lingering toward the back of the group. “Now’s our chance. . . . While they’re busy.”
With all eyes squarely on their tour guide and the Cartwright house, Dan followed close at Abby’s heels. They slunk back and back until they broke away from the group, and Abby led them quickly to a copse of bushes in a neighbor’s yard. Dan breathed a quick sigh of relief, certain they had made a clean getaway.
“Wandering off again?”
“Shit,” Jordan muttered, wincing as Micah appeared around the tall, scraggly tops of the bushes. Jordan shoved the binder papers up under his jacket. “How do we ditch him?”
“We don’t,” Dan said. And then to Micah, “Hey! What’s going on?”
“Not much. I guess Lara didn’t like the way I was looking at Melissa—she was the tour guide—so we were having a little, uh, disagreement. I figured I’d give us both some breathing room, you know?”
“So you and Lara—are you guys a thing?” Dan asked.
“Used to be, way back in freshman year. But she’s kind of the jealous type, if you know what I mean.”
Jordan tugged urgently on Dan’s sleeve, no doubt trying to signal that they should give Micah an excuse and be on their way. But Dan had a feeling they wouldn’t be getting rid of Micah that easily. They had drawn his suspicion too many times and now they’d just have to deal.
“We were in the library today and found some creepy old news clippings about the town,” Dan improvised. “The tour kind of took a nosedive—no offense—so we thought we’d check up on some real haunted houses.”
Abby shot Dan an incredulous look. She clearly didn’t agree with his plan, either.
“I suppose it is the season. . . . What house did you have in mind?”
“There’s one not too far,” Dan said, taking his phone out of his coat pocket and tapping the GPS app. “Let me just pull up the directions.”
“And how do you know this house is haunted exactly?” Micah asked.
“We . . . found a news article talking about those missing women in the sixties, and one of them lived nearby.” Now it was Abby’s turn to improvise. Her voice shook, but Micah nodded, apparently buying it. “Spooky, right?”
“It might not be empty,” Micah replied. “But we can take a look. Just don’t scream, all right? If Lara realizes we snuck away, she’ll chew my head off.”
“Here,” Dan said, handing him the Google map. “We’re trying to get here. Do you know the street?”
“Virgil? Yeah. The Art House is over that way.” Micah scratched his chin, squinting down at the paper. “I’ve been to a few parties around there. We can cut through the alley on Butler, shave off a minute or two of walking time.”
“Perfect!” Dan said, just barely modulating his fake enthusiasm. “Lead on.”
The wind picked up as they followed Micah across Ellis Street and toward a dark, narrow lane sandwiched between two houses.
A skeletal tree had managed to force its way to maturity in the alley. Its branches scraped against the houses’ eaves as the four of them scuttled down the lane. Dan glanced back to make sure no one from the group had seen them go and immediately wished he hadn’t. The pale little boy in the striped sweater was there watching them, and even though Dan didn’t let his eyes linger, he could swear the boy was smiling.
The alley dumped them out onto a weather-beaten strip of sidewalk. The trees were denser on this street, blocking out more of the already thin lamplight. Micah turned left, walking briskly toward an empty intersection. Most neighborhood trick-or-treaters had long since gone home, and the last groups out hardly paid them any attention, too fixated on their full bags of candy and grouchy parents. A few pumpkins remained on the stoops, glowing with sputtering candles.
“Almost there,” Micah said as they crossed the intersection. He pulled up the neck of his coat, ducking down against the wind. “Still up for this?”
“It was my idea, wasn’t it?” Dan caught up, striding next to him. He noticed a mint-green house across the street with a giant copper statue in the yard. “I take it that’s the Art House?”
“How’d you guess?” Micah chuckled. “Looks like there aren’t any cars in the driveway. Let’s cross here.”
Dan waited just a second or two before crossing, hanging back to check on Abby and Jordan. He wasn’t exactly surprised by the scowl Abby had waiting for him.
“So what do you want to do if we find something?” she whispered, eyes locked on Micah.
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“I don’t know,” Dan said. It was, sadly, the truth. “I hadn’t considered that part.”
“We don’t know if Micah is one of them! He could have been right alongside Cal in that maze!”
“He’s not like that. I think we might actually be able to trust him. He did warn us about Cal, remember?” And he had been the one to cover for Dan at the party, coming up with that smooth line for Abby. He wasn’t an Ivy League wannabe like Cal—not at all the type to get caught up in a secret society. “Sometimes you have to adjust. This is adjusting.”
“I’m stating for the record that this is a bad idea,” Abby replied crisply.
“Noted . . .”
“And that you’re being naive to trust anyone on this campus.”
“He’s already seen us,” Dan mumbled. “We just won’t clue him in on what we’re looking for.”
“You guys coming or what?” Micah gestured to them from the sidewalk. Behind him, a moldering two-story house waited in the shadows. Brown and dingy, it looked like a gingerbread house that had gotten damp. The roof sagged. The white house numbers near the front door were crooked. One had come unhinged except for the bottom screw and hung upside down.
“It certainly looks haunted,” Jordan said, grimacing. “Are we really going inside that?”
“Yup,” Dan replied.
“Too late to board the Nope Train to Screwthatsville?”
“Correct.”
“So what now?” Micah asked, turning to them. “You bring a Ouija board or what?”
This was the moment of truth, Dan decided, in more ways than one. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. If Micah said no—if he returned to campus and reported them for trespassing or, worse, called the police—then their weekend would end badly and abruptly.
“Now we’re going to break in and look around.”
Micah’s eyes narrowed dangerously and for a moment Dan was certain they were busted. He rubbed at the goatee on his chin and flicked his eyes to Jordan and then Abby. “I told you . . . I’ve gotten in trouble before. I don’t want to get in trouble again, Dan.”