I clench the sachet of thyme in my pocket and step out into the hallway. It’s completely dark except for the few glowing exit signs at both ends of the building. I suspect Cory and his friends are already here, probably getting things ready for their big night. I just wonder where they have Drea.
The flashlight gripped in my hand, I do my best to navigate my way down the main corridor, toward the French room, without having to use it. I’m pretty sure no one can see me in such darkness; I’m just hoping no one will hear me as well. I feel like it’s so loud inside my head right now—my heart pumping, my stomach clenching, a screaming sensation behind my eyes.
I step on something that breaks my concentration, making me jump. I step again. It’s soft beneath my feet. I scoot down to feel what it is. A cloth of some sort, like a tarp for painting. I reach out and feel the space around me—a couple cans of paint, I think; a few paint rollers; some rags. And a rope.
My heart starts pounding, thrashing inside my chest because I know just what it is. I swallow hard and inch my grip down the length until I feel it—them. Handles.
A jump rope.
I clamp my hand over my mouth to stop the screaming inside my head. Why are they doing this? How do they know? A whimper escapes from my throat. I do my best to crawl free of everything without making any more noise.
Voices come from the end of the hallway—whispery voices that I can’t identify. I wrestle myself up and move toward them, past the main entrance and now clearly back on linoleum flooring.
There’s a scratching sound just to the right of me—an amplified scratching, like the sound is emanating from a speaker. I stop. My heart wallops inside my chest.
“Hello, Stacey,” says the voice from the loudspeaker. His voice.
Donovan.
“Welcome back,” he says.
My chin shakes. My knees soften. I feel my head start to spin, like my world could come crashing down at any moment.
“I’m watching you,” he says.
Still paralyzed in place, it’s everything I can do not to cry out, not to switch on the flashlight and surrender to my fate. But I can’t. Not now. Not with Drea depending on me.
I move farther down the hallway. The French room is just a few yards away now. I slowly approach the doorway, visions of Veronica Leeman lying dead on the floor heavy on my mind—the pool of blood surrounding her head; the clay planter, what Donovan hit her with, still intact on the floor beside her.
My mouth fills up with fear—a sour, salty paste at the base of my tongue that makes me want to heave. I take a deep breath and stand just to the right of the French room door, mentally readying myself to peer in. From this angle, I can see candles lit at the back of the room. I take a step closer. More candles—a circle of them in the middle of the floor, designating perhaps the sacred space for the séance.
I’m just about to click on my flashlight, to see if there’s any sign of Drea, when I notice a few candles move at the front of the room. They’re lighting the faces of Emma and Trish, who hold them midair and whisper back and forth about tonight’s plans, how Veronica’s spirit will tell them what to do.
The scratching sound begins again on the loudspeaker. “Hello, Stacey,” Donovan’s voice repeats.
“Is she even here yet?” Emma asks.
“It’s only 10:15.” Trish moves to the sacred circle and takes a seat at the head.
I step back into the hallway and press my spine up against the wall, as though the darkness alone isn’t enough to conceal me, as though the wall has the power to swallow me up whole. I do my best to breathe in and out, to calm this pumping in my chest, and to hold it together, when all I really want to do is fall apart.
My only hope is that Amber, Chad, and PJ have gotten my message by now, that they’ve done the sensible thing and called campus police, that they’re on their way.
My back still pressed up against the wall, I can hear someone walking at the other end of the hallway; their footsteps squeak against the linoleum floor and echo off the walls. I’m pretty sure the person’s alone, pretty sure they’re headed this way, to the French room. But I’m also pretty sure that this isn’t the same person who was following me from the dorm earlier. Those footsteps made a clomping sound, like from boot heels; these are definitely sneakers.
A flashlight beam shines down in this direction. I look toward the exit lights to my right. There’s a set of doors there, but whoever is approaching will probably be able to see me leave.
The beam gets closer and so do the footsteps—past the main entrance now, on this side of the building. I can hear people moving in the French room, probably hearing the approaching footsteps as well.
I step quickly past the open doorway and stand mid-hallway. I can’t stay here; I know the flashlight beam will eventually make its way to me, catch me like a deer in headlights. Or Emma and Trish’s candles will be just enough to cast a shadow over my hiding body.
“Stacey,” the loudspeaker crackles. “I’m watching you.”
I step across the hallway and slip into a classroom. I crouch down behind the door and wait. My heart is beating so loud and fast I think it must be audible. I ball myself up tighter, my knees pressed into my chest, and hold my breath.
After what seems like several minutes of not hearing anything else, I inch my way from behind the door and remain crouched in the doorway. The flashlight beam is gone and everything seems vacant. I crawl toward the double doors and feel something beneath my fingertips. A stick of some sort. I feel around on the ground a bit more and find more of them. I pick one up and run my fingertip over the smooth, buttery tip, the paper wrapped around it.
They’re crayons.
I swallow down the jittering inside me as best I can and push the doors ever so slightly. They make a moaning noise, but, as though by some wonderful and all-knowing force, the scratching sound plays again over the loudspeaker and manages to drown it out—just enough for me to crawl through the crack I’ve made.
I click on my flashlight and move as quickly and quietly as possible down a set of stairs. Another pair of exit doors faces me, the ones that will lead me outside. I go to dive right through them, to run and get help. But it’s like I’m frozen in place, nailed to the floor. I’m going to be sick. I hold the quake in my stomach, the juices gurgling, climbing their way up to my throat. What does this mean? What is this sickness trying to tell me?
My head is throbbing, trying to make sense of everything. I take another step toward the exit doors and my mouth fills with the warmest, most pungent sour taste—like my body won’t let me leave. Like I have no choice but to go with my instincts.
I turn to gaze down another flight of stairs. And that’s when I know—when my nightmare unfolds all around me. This is the basement I dreamed about. And this is where my body is leading me—closer to Maura, to what she’s trying to tell me.
My mouth fills with a second helping of bile, causing my head to spin, for me to hunch forward and let it all out, my throat burning now. I wipe my mouth and take a few steps down the stairs. There’s a thick steel door at the bottom, a giant letter M scribbled across it. I pull it open to allow myself through, holding its weight behind me so it doesn’t slam shut.
A long, narrow hallway. I shine my light along the walls. Doors line both sides and overhead bulbs cast dim, yellowy light. I begin my way down, noting how the floors and walls are painted a deep green color, how the pipes leak overhead and make a pattering sound against the cement. How the lyrics to the “Miss Mary Mack” song have been scribbled on the walls along the way.
I take a deep breath, reminding myself that Maura wouldn’t be leading me to any danger she didn’t think I could handle. My stomach bubbles up again—like I’m getting closer. There’s a knocking coming from the end of the hallway. I’m half-expecting it to be Maura, jumping rope. Even though I kn
ow she’s dead.
I continue down the hallway, noticing the weathered, gray door at the very end—the one that faces me. The one from my nightmares. The knocking sound is coming from someplace around it, maybe from behind it.
“Hello, Stacey.” It’s Donovan’s voice from the loudspeaker again. “Welcome back.”
I bite down on my tongue to keep from crying out, and grip over my ears. But the knocking sound gets louder.
“I’m watching you,” he says.
I’m shaking my head, trying to retain some sort of mindfulness. My stomach winces; bile squirts up toward my throat. I bend at the waist and dry heave—my stomach now completely empty.
I wipe my mouth with my sleeve, noticing how my cheeks are damp with tears. None of this makes sense. Maura is dead. Donovan is locked up. There’s no way Cory and his group could have gotten him out. Plus, how is he related to my Maura nightmares? Why would he be waiting for me down here?
Unless someone told him—someone who knew all about my nightmares. Someone who could sense things about me that no one else knew.
“Stacey?” A voice from just behind me. Jacob’s voice.
I turn around.
He emerges from the steel door, letting it slam shut behind him. “I knew I would find you here.” He’s pointing his flashlight beam right at me, so hard I have to block my eyes.
“Get away from me.” I grip the crystal in my palm and ready myself to throw it.
“Stacey, you have to trust me.” He takes a few steps closer. “Just listen to me for a second. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You heard me!” I shout.
Jacob ignores my warning and lunges right at me. He moves to grab the crystal, but I clench both hands around it and thrust with all my might up into his groin. Jacob buckles at the waist, but he doesn’t go down.
I look at his feet . . . the rubber-soled sneakers. Just like the ones upstairs—the ones headed for the French room, for the séance. I take a step back and Jacob follows, still just inches from me. I swing toward his head but he catches the punch and grapples to restrain me. The storming in my stomach rages, inching up toward my throat again. I’m wasting time. I pull my neck back and plunge head-first into his forehead in a head-butt. Jacob staggers back, tripping over his feet. He falls, hitting his head against the cement wall.
I turn and run as fast as I can, down the hallway, where the knocking continues, becomes more urgent. I twist and pull at the doorknob with all my might, but it’s no use. It just won’t budge.
“Drea!” I shout into the door crack. “Is that you? Are you in there?” I pound and kick the door, jam my fingers into the crack until they bleed from splinters. Until I’ve exhausted myself completely. There’s no more knocking. Just the pattering of water droplets against the floor. I scrunch down against the door and my throat fills with bile, causing me to choke, telling me that I can’t give up, that I have to keep working.
I get up and try the knob again. Still locked. I take a deep breath and look around the framing of the door, noticing the ledge at the top. I reach up, run my finger along it, and feel a key. My hand shaking slightly, I stick the key in the hole and jiggle around until I hear the lock turn.
It’s dark inside. I shine my flashlight around the perimeter of the room with one hand, and feel around the walls for a light switch with the other. My finger rubs over something sharp—a nail in the wall maybe.
I poke my bleeding finger into my mouth and look around the room. It’s a small custodian’s workroom—workbench to the right with tools scattered all over it, shelves loaded with paint cans, cleaning buckets, and rubber gloves, and a large buffer machine in the center. But what attracts me the most is the collection of origami; dozens of paper frogs, fish, birds, and more line the metal shelves.
My mouth turns dry and I heave, the breath catching in my throat, making me gag. A jump rope hangs from a hook at the back of the room. I move toward it and hear the door slam shut.
I let my eyes close and try to listen to my body and my intuition, not to think or reason or make sense out of all this. Not to fight it.
I know who it is. It’s just like my mother and Jacob said—the truth lies in my past. And being here, in this shed—the familiar smell of mildew and must so thick in the air, the cracked cement walls—I feel like my past has been laid out all around me: Maura, having to vomit, the henna drawings, the forgotten promise. It’s not about Cory and his gang, or Jacob, or even Drea. It’s about stopping it from ever happening again. Stopping him. That’s why I’m here. That’s what Maura is trying to help me do.
He clicks the light switch on, and I turn around to find him. Miles Parker—the man who abducted Maura that day, who made her sick with his cherry brandy, drove drunk into a tree, and then carried her body off into the woods, leaving her in a tool shed until she died.
“That’s the real thing, you know.” He’s pointing at the jump rope. “The actual rope she was jumping on the day I picked her up. Wanna touch it? Wanna see if it still smells like her?”
I clench my flashlight and feel my jaw lock.
“I’ll never forget it,” he continues. “She was jumping rope and singing that little song, the sidewalk around her all red from her crayon—from where she drew hearts and her favorite letter.”
He smiles and I feel myself swallow, the inside of my mouth now a bit more moist, less dry and pasty.
Miles looks a lot different than the way he looked in court—older, scruffier, with sallow skin. His once sooty-dark hair has grayed quite a bit as well. It curls over his ears and hangs past the nape of his neck.
“I’m a little disappointed you didn’t keep your promise,” he says. “When you sent me that letter four years ago, I really expected you to follow through—to be waiting for my parole, to make me pay for what happened. Such an angry little girl.” He’s wearing a custodial uniform, like he planned this whole thing out—finding me, getting a job here.
“That was a long time ago,” I say, noticing that he’s also wearing a pair of work boots that have hard heels—the same boots that were no doubt following me from the dorm.
“Like yesterday to me,” he snaps. “It’s one of the things that kept me going. I wanted to meet the person who gave the police that anonymous tip.”
“What are you talking about?” I take a step back, bumping into the buffer machine.
He smiles at me—his thin, chalky lips peeling back to reveal a chipped tooth in front. “The tip that led them to me. To the tool shed where the body was found. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, Stacey Brown.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “I didn’t give any anonymous tip.”
“Your letter said otherwise.”
I think about it a moment, but it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t give any anonymous tip. I mean, I should have. I wanted to. But I didn’t. The letter I sent him said I could only sense about the kidnapping, about where she was hidden. Any anonymous tip given to the police was from someone else.
“The letter didn’t say that,” I say. “It only said I had a feeling about Maura being taken, about where she was hidden.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
I take another step back, bumping into a collection of mops, my spine pressed up against the cement wall now. “My friends are just upstairs,” I say. “They’re going to be wondering where I am.”
“I know they’re not your friends, Stacey. They’re my friends. They’ve been helping me.”
“What do you mean?” I feel my chin shake. I clench my teeth in an effort to halt the trembling.
“I’ve been watching you, Stacey,” he pauses. “And I’ve been watching them. I know how interested they are in you. That gave us something in common, them and me. I thought getting a job here would be enough to get close to you.
But, getting to know them . . . that was icing on the cake—made things so much easier.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They told me about their plans for tonight, how they were going to get you here, how they wanted to try and re-create the scene from last year. They told me all about it, Stacey. You couldn’t mind your own business then, either, could you?”
I swallow hard and try leaning back a little farther, as though the wall has the power to give way, but there isn’t any room. I’m trapped.
“So what else could I do but help them?” he continues. “Give them access. I mean, here you are, just where I’ve wanted you. And all I had to do was give them a key.”
“What do you want?”
“Payback,” he says, taking another step, closing in on me. “You’re a snake, Stacey. You should have minded your own business—should have kept your mouth shut. Do you have any idea what prison is like? What one has to do to occupy his time—to keep from going insane?”
I glance over his shoulder at the origami figures. Miles extends his hand to my chin to steal the glance back. I want to knock his hand away, but I don’t. He towers over me; his weight is probably double mine.
My mind races with what I should do. Bite his hand? Try poking him in the eyes?
Miles reaches up to grab the jump rope. He drapes it around his shoulders and runs the handle along my cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Ropes aren’t my style. I prefer to use my hands. That gift I left you was just a little clue. Like the tape player and the letters—just little reminders. Could you sense that, too, Stacey—the way I’ve been watching you?”
“I didn’t give any anonymous tip,” I say, tears rolling down my cheeks. “You have to believe that it wasn’t me.” I glance to the left, spotting a hammer hanging on the wall. Miles drops the jump rope to the floor and places his thumbs at the front of my neck. “I don’t like people who break their promises, Stacey. And I hate liars even more.”
I clench my teeth, wondering how I can stall him, what I could possibly say to change his mind, get him to see the truth.