It was warm in his palm, though it looked like it should have been cold.
“Turk! Turk!”
Daniel looked at the stone for a long time, and waited until the hypnotist turned around to pour a cup of tea from the little smoking stove in the corner. Then he put the stone in his pocket, took up one of the heavy candlesticks in both hands, and swung it as hard as he could. Purple wax scalded his palm, but he hardly felt it. There was more blood than he expected, and it came out of his smashed melon head so fast, so thick . . .
The candlestick was too heavy for his little hands. He dropped it and climbed on Maudire’s back and wrapped his hands around the old hypnotist’s neck. It was good he was so old and frail; his neck was just a warm, pulsing pipe under Daniel’s hands, no bigger around than one of Mother’s milk bottles.
The purple wax on his wrist cooled and cracked off, and under his hands Maudire stopped moving.
“Turk!”
Daniel hated that bird. He took another candlestick and tipped it over, pouring hot wax all over the bird. His wings were clipped, and he couldn’t fly, but he could shriek as the wax scalded and burned. Then he hit the bird, too, because he hated it, because he didn’t want to hear that stupid word anymore.
What was a Turk anyway?
Daniel wiped his hands on the tattered, striped carpet and left the tent.
He smiled as he walked through the carnival; he had the stone now and tomorrow Patrick would shut up for good.
Dan never seemed to slide gracefully out of sleep these days. He shot up, feeling a hand clutch at his arm. For a second he was sure it was the Scarlets coming for him, or that bearded old man from his dreams, but instead it was Abby.
She shook him lightly, her phone vibrating its alarm in her palm.
“What time is it?” he asked, groggy.
“Eight,” Abby mumbled, “in the morning. I . . . uh, might have fallen asleep, too. But it looks like nobody found us. So . . . hooray?”
Jordan was missing, but he soon arrived from around the corner, a bounty of junk food heaped high in his arms. Dan’s stomach rumbled in anticipation.
“Soup’s up,” Jordan said, smiling despite the dark smudges under his eyes. He tossed Dan a bottle of orange juice and a frosted cinnamon bun in a plastic wrapper. “You look rough. Bad dreams?”
“Aren’t they always?” Dan replied, cracking open the orange juice and guzzling.
“Mine were bad, too,” Abby said softly. She leaned forward from the wall and started to gather her hair into a ponytail. “Lucy and Lara were chasing me, but they didn’t have faces. I only knew it was them because they kept laughing.” She shivered. “It was awful.”
“So what do we do now?” Jordan leaned against the wall opposite from them and turned on his phone. He stared at it glumly while he chewed a disintegrating powdered doughnut. “Just wait for Lara to call? What happens if she doesn’t?”
“She will. She has to.”
Dan wasn’t so sure. He hoped Abby was right, but after seeing Micah’s fate, he refused to underestimate Professor Reyes and what she would do to keep control of her followers—what she would do to find him.
He sighed and choked down a bite of cinnamon roll. It wasn’t smart to take his meds on an empty stomach. He was just glad he carried them everywhere, or going back to pick the lock on Micah’s room would have been a necessity. How was he ever going to get his stuff back? What if they never saw Micah again? “Maybe Lara can tell us who we can actually trust around here. She’s a Scarlet, so she must know who isn’t one. There might still be a chance that the police aren’t mixed up in all of this.”
“What I wanna know is why they didn’t just leave when the weird shit started happening,” Jordan said, flipping his phone around in his palm idly. “You’d think after the first ice pick lobotomy someone would’ve spoken up.”
“Right, just like we left the second things got hairy this summer?” Abby snorted drily.
“Touché.”
Abby scooted closer, picking up Dan’s notes and glancing over them while Jordan took a seat and browsed the newspaper from the archive.
“It’s strange to look at her like this,” Jordan said. He opened to the picture of the sorority girls lined up. “She looks . . . normal. You think she was already mixed up with the warden?”
“I think so, yeah,” Dan replied. His teeth felt furry. He hadn’t been able to wash his face or brush his teeth since the morning before. “The timelines match up.”
“So even then, she was . . .” And here Jordan stopped himself, twinkling his fingertips in front of his eyes. “Bedazzled or whatever.”
“What’s this?” A fast reader, Abby was already done skimming through most of the packet. “‘Sanctum, a holy or sacred place,’” she read. “‘What could be more sacred than possessing the power of your own true thoughts? Sanctum. It is both lock and key.’” With a puzzled hmm sound she lowered the pages. “Do you think the house we found was this sanctum? If that was his house, it would make sense.”
“Probably,” Dan said, “or it could be Brookline. Hell, it could be that stupid rock of his.”
He thought of his dream and the young Daniel Crawford bludgeoning the hypnotist like it was nothing at all. Instructing his older brother to leap to his death because he was a bully. Of course the only sacred thing to such a person would be his own thoughts.
“It’s such an odd way to phrase it,” Abby continued. “And he seems so obsessed with logic and science and knowledge. All this junk about holiness and it being sacred seems out of place.”
“At this point I wouldn’t write anything off,” Jordan said, then paused, starting a little as his phone buzzed its way across the carpet. “Do I answer?”
“Let me,” Abby said, snatching up the phone. She tucked a piece of dark hair behind her ear three times even though it stayed put the first time.
The cinnamon roll in Dan’s stomach turned sour. He half expected Professor Reyes to be on the other end when Abby picked up.
“Hello? Lara? Oh, thank God you’re safe. Sure . . . Is everything . . . Yeah, yeah we can meet you there. Oh . . . Just me? I . . . I don’t know. I mean, yeah, sure, I’ll come alone.” Dan shook his head urgently at her but Abby ignored him. “No problem. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Abby hung up, breathing heavily. Her knuckles were bluish white around the phone. “She sounded frightened.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Jordan muttered.
“She wants just me to go. . . . You two will have to hang behind. Maybe I can talk her down.”
“You should’ve asked if she was alone,” Dan said. Especially if she sounded afraid. “Where are you meeting her?”
“At her studio in the art building,” Abby replied, gathering up her coat and mittens and standing. “Where I went to see her installation. It’s out of the way, and I don’t think anyone will be there this early on a Sunday. . . . Maybe just a janitor or two.”
“You know this is a trap, right?” Jordan asked, helping Abby straighten the hood on her coat, which had gotten tangled.
“Of course it is,” she said with a tired laugh. “But what are our options at this point?”
“We won’t let you go in there alone,” Dan assured her, pulling on his cold-weather gear and packing up their notes.
“I’m going to hide these,” he said. “If we’re walking into a trap, the last thing I want is Professor Reyes getting her hands on our notes. Here.” He shifted the files and journals into an orderly pile and handed them to Abby. “Stick these in the girls’ bathroom, a vent maybe.”
She disappeared down the hall momentarily, and returned with her coat zipped and her hat pulled down snugly over her ears. “Trap or not,” Abby said, “I think I have an idea.”
As they stood outside the art building shivering in the milky sunlight, Dan found himself wondering if he would ever be warm again. He hadn’t expected to miss the uncomfortably cramped hallway where they had spent the night, but anything was better than
listening to his teeth rattle around in his skull while his feet started to go numb.
The art building was low and wide, with two warped columns protecting the entrance. The stout profile and oddly shaped columns reminded him of a bulldog’s bowlegged stance.
“When you said ‘idea,’ I thought you meant like a plan plan, not charging in, conspicuously absent guns blazing,” Jordan said, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers.
Abby hushed him. He and Dan were standing to either side of the door, not visible to whoever might be lurking inside the art building.
“It is a plan, which you would see if you just shut up for one minute.” She took out Jordan’s phone and inched off her mitten to dial. Before tapping the number she said, “I’m going to call Lara and tell her the door’s locked, that I can’t get in. It will force her to come out here. When she opens the door we can grab her and go. That way if there’s anyone waiting inside to ambush us they won’t get the drop.”
“That’s . . . not a bad plan actually,” Jordan admitted with a shrug.
“Shhh, it’s ringing. Get ready, we won’t have much time to get away.”
Silence. Dan rubbed his arms furiously, trying to coax feeling back into them. He felt like they were waiting for the executioner to show up; even if Lara could help them, first she would have to actually cooperate and evade the Scarlets. For a moment he closed his eyes and imagined himself back home, warm, hands wrapped around a steamy cup of cocoa with a blanket over his lap.
“It went to voice mail,” Abby said. She tried the number again. “She’s not picking up. . . . Crap. One more try.”
“Hang on.” Jordan shifted closer to her, as close as he could get without being visible through the glass windows surrounding the door. “Do you hear that?”
Abby put her ear to the door.
Dan couldn’t hear anything but a few birds calling to one another on top of the building next door.
“Is that the ‘Monster Mash’?”
“It’s her ringtone,” Abby said, holding up the phone. “Maybe we should go in.”
“Dial again, let’s make sure,” Dan suggested.
He strained to listen for the ringtone, and almost as soon as Abby hit redial he heard a faint twinkling that gradually transformed into a melody. The fact that her phone had rung through three times now worried him. It didn’t make sense. If there was an ambush waiting for them inside, then she would have put her phone on silent or interrupted the calls, or, hell, answered.
“We should go in,” Abby said, handing Jordan back his phone. “She would’ve picked up by now.”
“I’m with you on this one,” Dan agreed. “Something’s not right.” Then he reached out and put his hand over the doorknob, blocking them from going in. “And if there really is an ambush waiting for us inside, run and split up. They’ll have a harder time catching us that way. If you get away, turn your phones back on and we’ll find somewhere to meet up.”
“Got it,” Jordan said.
“Try to be quiet,” Abby added, pushing Dan’s hand away and turning the doorknob. “We might be able to get a quick peek and then hightail it.”
Dan soon realized a “quick peek” wasn’t going to be in the cards. Something smooth and white was lying on the floor just inside the foyer. He paused, but Abby had already rushed ahead, bending to pick it up.
“Okay, what is that?” Jordan whispered, pointing frantically.
“It’s a hand,” Abby replied quietly. “A mannequin hand.” She frowned, looking up slowly from the plastic fingers to Dan’s face. “This is part of her project.”
Dan took a careful step out of the foyer and into the corridor that bisected it. To the left the hall was empty, with several doors leading off into what he presumed were practice studios. To the right . . .
“There’s another one,” Abby said, trotting off to retrieve it. This piece was a foot. “Guys . . . I really don’t like this. Lara would never take her own work apart. This project meant the world to her.”
“Where’s her studio?” Dan asked, although he hardly needed to. He could already see another cast-off piece of mannequin behind her. The discarded body parts made a trail down the hall. Abby turned and led them the right way, pausing to look over each crumb left on the trail. A thigh . . . a forearm . . . a head.
When they reached the torso, Dan realized they were standing outside a half-open door. Abby was quick to reach for it, but Dan delayed her. Her hand was shaking uncontrollably when he took hold of it.
“Whatever we find in there,” he murmured, looking at them both in turn, “don’t scream.”
Abby put her palm flat on the door and pushed. The hinges creaked mournfully, the door swinging open slowly, revealing yet more of the trail of mannequin parts. Broken riggings hung from the ceiling, the ropes and wires still dangling as if recently ripped apart. A few nails and screws hung from the ends of the wires. The mannequins had probably been suspended, he thought, wishing he could’ve seen what the piece was supposed to look like.
At his side, Abby gasped softly, sprinting past the morbid trail of plastic body parts to the flesh-and-blood body lying in the center of the studio.
He almost broke his own rule, feeling the urge to scream rise fast and painful in his throat.
It was Lara, lying sprawled on the ground with her head cocked to one side. She was almost smiling, like someone who had thought of a joke and couldn’t wait to share it. Her hands were curled under her body. The blood was still pooling out from her, and Abby had to take a quick step back to avoid it touching her sneakers.
“Oh my God,” Abby said, holding one trembling hand over her mouth.
Carefully, Dan and Jordan picked their way across the studio to her. Abby followed a few shaky steps behind. Cal or the professor, Dan wondered, but he didn’t say anything, putting an arm around Abby and squeezing her while she wiped at the tears on her face.
“I know it’s awful, Abby, but we have to leave her,” Dan whispered.
“We can’t . . . Not like this . . .”
He started to pull her back, away from the body. The mannequin parts slipped out of Abby’s grasp, clattering to the floor.
“We can’t be seen here,” Dan added. He watched Jordan kneel down and wipe the end of his jacket over the mannequin pieces Abby had touched. “If we don’t go now, someone will find us. That’s exactly what Professor Reyes would want, to have us detained. To find me.”
Abby wrenched herself out of his grasp, spinning and planting her feet. “Can you just shut up about all this warden crap for once? That’s a person! A real person! We can’t leave her here. We have to call 911, we have to do something.”
“Abs, she’s dead,” Jordan said gently. “There’s nothing we can do.” He turned to Dan and made a futile half gesture to the door. “Maybe we could call 911 and hang up. At least then we know someone would come.”
“We have to get out of here,” Dan replied, going to the door. He wasn’t about to stand around and get caught and then blamed for a death he had nothing to do with. Maybe if she was still alive they could dawdle, but she wasn’t. “If this is a setup, the police could already be on their way, don’t you get it?”
Dan glanced up at the ceiling, looking for cameras. They should never have come.
“I’m not leaving her,” Abby said finally, crossing her arms.
“Then stay,” Dan grumbled. “But I’m not sticking around here another minute.”
Jordan hesitated, then followed Dan to the door. Only a few seconds later and he heard Abby running to catch up with them in the hall. “Dan . . .”
“Follow me,” he said brusquely. “I know what we can do.”
“Dan, wait—” Abby pulled on his arm, but he didn’t slow down until they reached the end of the corridor and a side door marked “EXIT.” Right next to it was a little red box with a handle.
“Wait,” she said again, pleading.
“I can’t, Abby, and neither can you.” He pointed to t
he fire alarm. “When you’re ready, pull it. Look, I know you’re upset. I am too. But I’m also scared, okay? Are you forgetting? You were supposed to come alone. Alone. The whole thing was a trap.”
“All the more reason she deserves our pity!” Abby fired back. “Not . . . whatever this is! Someone murdered her!”
“We can’t stay and wait for the police. It’s not one of our options right now, so pull the fire alarm or don’t. I’m leaving.”
The outside cold hit him like a slap in the face. He jogged, hands deep in his pockets, his feet pounding the ground harder than necessary. At least this way he got a little warmer. Not much, but anything was better than letting the image of Lara’s lifeless face creep back into focus.
This wasn’t Professor Reyes. This was the warden. But he couldn’t lash out at the warden, so the professor would have to do. She had attacked Micah and now she had attacked Lara. It didn’t take much extrapolating to see that they were next. Swearing, he blinked, hard, forcing back the panic threatening to rob his nerve altogether.
Behind him, the shrill fire alarm sounded and then Abby and Jordan were next to him, and it only made the guilt worse.
He knew it was the right thing to do, leaving like that, otherwise they would be caught either by the police or the Scarlets, and neither option would get them safely out of Camford.
Abby marched right by him. She stopped about ten feet beyond where he’d come to a rest; then she turned right around and came back toward him.
“I don’t like what we just did,” Abby said resolutely. “And I don’t care if it’s dangerous, I’m going to the police.”
“What? Abby, you know that’s not a good idea.”
“We have information,” she half yelled. Jordan appeared at her side, taking her by the arm and leading her away from the building.