As it happened, when they got off the bus Eric was waiting for them, leaning next to the school doors as groups of bustling students pushed and shoved their way past.
Eric folded his arms across his chest and looked Daniel in the eye. “Man, are you in trouble, Corrigan.”
Daniel blanched. Even Rohan took a step backward, bumping right into Mollie.
“What are you talking about?” asked Daniel, his voice going an octave too high.
“Where’s the Phillies cap I sent to the hospital? You know how hard it was for me to even touch that thing, much less buy one for you?”
Daniel breathed a sigh of relief. Of course Noble’s Green didn’t have a major-league baseball team, so Eric had chosen the nearby Pittsburgh Pirates as his. Their main rivals just happened to be Daniel’s team, the Phillies.
“It’s at home. Although I appreciate the gift, I didn’t really want to wear it in front of you. Remind you how sucky the Pirates are doing this season and all….”
Eric smiled. “Thoughtful of you. How’s the arm feeling?”
“Itches. But otherwise it’s okay.”
“Must’ve been a heck of a tree that you fell out of. What were you doing climbing a tree at night anyway?”
“Well, uh,” Daniel stuttered.
Mollie stepped in. “’Cause I dared him to,” she said. “So it’s really all my fault.”
“Well, I think he’s got to share the blame for going along with one of your crazy ideas. I thought you would know better by now, Daniel.”
“Yeah, well. You know me, always showing off.”
Eric smiled again, but Daniel thought he caught a flash of something else on his face. He told himself that he was just being paranoid, but for a split second he thought he saw Eric give him a look—a look that he hadn’t seen before.
Whether Rohan saw it, too, Daniel didn’t know, but it was Rohan who changed the subject.
“Have you spoken to Simon much?” he asked.
Now Eric was definitely troubled, and he made no effort to hide it. “Not at all. He barely seems to know who I am. He’s a lot worse than any of the others. It’s like, not only doesn’t he remember the powers, he doesn’t remember us. He knows who I am, but he doesn’t remember that I’m his friend. Michael drifted away, but this is different. More … sudden. It’s like he never even knew us.”
No one said anything after that. Eric’s birthday was next, but with the exception of Rose, they were all getting close. Losing your powers, and the memory of ever having powers, was bad enough, but losing the memories of your friends altogether was something else. This was a new kind of terror.
The ringing of the first bell kept them from dwelling on these maudlin thoughts, as the entirety of grades four through six scrambled to get to class on time.
Daniel had almost reached homeroom when Mollie grabbed him by his good arm (thankfully) and pulled him behind a stairwell.
“Hey, what are you doing? I’m going to be late!”
“We have to do something, Daniel!” Her eyes were wild with anger. Gone was the humbled Mollie of an hour ago—the old Mollie was back now and there was no one to save Daniel from her this time.
“Right now? Mollie, the bell just rang! Snyder will kill us!”
“You heard Eric! It’s different now—it’s worse! Eric is going to forget about us. Eventually we’ll all forget.”
Daniel tried to take his arm back but Mollie held on tight. He tried to look as if it weren’t a struggle, but it was—he was caught.
“We don’t know that for sure, Mollie. It might just be Simon.”
“You don’t believe that, Daniel. The Shroud saw you. He knows that we know about him, and this is his punishment! It’s not fair!”
The halls were emptying out now, the last few stragglers running for their classrooms, hoping to make it before the second bell.
“We can talk about this later!”
“No!” Mollie’s grip loosened and Daniel took his arm back, but he didn’t bolt away. There was that something in Mollie’s face, a determination in her eyes that kept him there just as surely as if she had pinned him to the floor. “You don’t get it, do you? Eventually there won’t be any of us left to remember—only you! You’ll have all these memories, all these friendships, and we won’t even know who you are….”
The second bell rang, and then the hallway was quiet except for the sound of shutting doors. Mollie was quiet, too.
“All right,” Daniel said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Tell your parents that we’re doing homework together at my house. After school.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. Why?”
“We’re going to the other side of Mount Noble. We’re going to the Old Quarry.”
“The Old Quarry? But the Rules …”
“Well, we will just have to break the Rules. Again. We need answers, Daniel, and we are running out of time. Please, for Eric?”
Daniel swallowed hard and nodded.
Mollie nodded back, and Daniel watched as she turned and strode down the hall, her head held high. Mollie Lee was once again a girl on a mission, and strangely enough, Daniel was glad. It suited her.
Daniel followed her, but he didn’t rush. He was already late; a few seconds more wouldn’t matter. As he walked, he remembered that first day in the tree house and the reading of the Rules—
The North Face and the Old Quarry Are Off-Limits. Danger Waits for Us There.
Danger Waits for Us There. …
Today Daniel was very homesick for Philadelphia.
Chapter Thirteen
The Old Quarry
The trip to the Old Quarry took longer than either of them wanted. Daniel had expected them to fly there, but it turned out that he was a lot heavier than Louisa, and since Mollie wasn’t super-strong like Eric, she didn’t want to risk dropping him along the way. And since Daniel had no wish to be dropped, they decided to bike there instead. By the time they arrived, the sun had already started to set.
Daniel had only ever seen the south face of Mount Noble, and the difference was startling. On the south face, even at night you could still see the signs of civilization—hiking trails, the lights of far-off homes twinkling in the distance. But here, the wilds of nature dominated everything.
Tangled trees reached high into the sky, and the underbrush was thick and nearly impassable. Except for the quarry, there were no signs of humanity’s touch at all. It was obvious to Daniel that for many, many years the north face had been off-limits to not just the Supers but everyone.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since the quarry closed,” he said.
“No, I doubt that anyone has. The north face has always been an unlucky place. The quarry closed back in the fifties, after a bunch of bad stuff happened there. Some kind of accident or something. The Shawnee tribe had a strange name for this place—they called it Witch Fire Mountain.”
Daniel stared at Mollie. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Mollie Lee?”
She gave him an indignant look. “What? Just because you’re the detective doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to use the Internet, too. I did some research, that’s all.”
Daniel thought back to the first, and only, time that he had seen a picture of Jonathan Noble—not the comic-book character that he had inspired, but the real man.
“Mollie, I saw an old photograph of Jonathan Noble standing with a bunch of children, and there was something about a fire.”
“The St. Alban’s fire,” she said. “Sure, it’s in all the local history books. It’s what made Jonathan Noble so famous. Before that he was just an ordinary fur trader.”
Daniel remembered the look on those kids’ faces—they were scared and tired. Even Noble himself was a mess, covered in dirt and soot. He hadn’t looked much like a hero then: he’d looked like a man who had just been through something terrible. “What happened?”
“St. Alban’s was some kind of orphanage c
onnected to a monastery up here. In the 1930s, the monastery burned down. Everyone was killed, except for the orphans themselves—Jonathan Noble was passing by when he saw the fire, and he risked his own life to save them. He rescued every single child.”
Daniel looked around at the menacing trees and the deep black gorge of the quarry just a few feet away. “Let me guess,” he said. “St. Alban’s was never rebuilt and years later …”
“Yep. A mining company came in and dug a limestone quarry in the very same spot. The quarry suffered accident after accident, and eventually it was abandoned.”
Daniel felt a small chill go up his spine at the thought of all that misery occurring in a single lonely place, on the dark side of this very mountain.
“And here we are,” he said.
Mollie tossed him a backpack, then flipped on a flashlight and revealed a trail that wound off into the trees and disappeared into a giant pit, the size of a small valley, dug out of the side of the mountain itself.
“Here we are,” she agreed, and with that she started down.
The path was dark and treacherous, carved out of the quarry walls. At one time it had been a winding road, wide enough to allow the workers’ trucks and other machinery down to the quarry floor. But time and the elements had eroded much of the gravel and dirt away, and today the road was barely a footpath. At points it was hardly wide enough for a single person to squeeze by.
There were a few stumbles along the way, and at one point Daniel thought he saw something move along the path ahead of them. He and Mollie stayed frozen for about five minutes, shining their lights up ahead and listening to the sound of their own heartbeats. When nothing else happened, Mollie blamed Daniel’s sighting on a coyote or bobcat crossing the path, which didn’t make Daniel feel a whole lot better. Cautiously, they resumed their descent.
They reached the bottom without further incident, and Daniel was thankful when the sloping path leveled out onto firmer ground. These days the Old Quarry was hardly recognizable as a quarry at all. Over fifty years, nature had gone a long way toward reclaiming what humankind had taken away. The deep chasm still remained, but grass, shrubs and even a few small trees had taken root in the once-barren earth. The treasure here had been limestone, and exposed veins of the solid rock were still visible in the walls of the place, though they were hard to see in the fading daylight. There were plenty of corners and crannies down here that were hidden in blackness. Finding clues would be a task indeed.
The two intrepid explorers surveyed the area. “This place looks creepy enough,” said Mollie as she shone her flashlight in a broad circle around them.
“Well, there has to be a reason why it’s forbidden. But more importantly,” added Daniel as he eyed the desolate landscape, “forbidden by who?”
Mollie didn’t answer, but the look on her face told Daniel that she was wondering the same thing. “C’mon,” she said after a moment. “We didn’t come here just to stand around worrying.
“Careful of sinkholes,” she warned. “There are bound to be some deep ones around here that might have filled with water over the years. I’m a great flier but I’m kind of a lousy swimmer. I wouldn’t be much help if you fell in.”
Daniel followed Mollie deeper into the quarry, careful to shine his light on the ground in front of them. “So, what do you suppose we are looking for?” he asked.
“I dunno, Daniel. Clues, I guess. You’re the detective!”
Clues, Daniel thought. Right. In an overgrown quarry fifty years old. No problem.
They had been at it for about ten minutes when something began to bother Daniel. The south end of the quarry, where they had come in, was wild and overgrown. Daniel was covered in scratches and cuts from all the thornbushes they had pushed through. But as they neared the north end, the underbrush cleared significantly. He found that he could walk without fear of stinging branches whipping him in the face. There weren’t even any spiderwebs spanning the path ahead of them.
The path ahead of them …
“Mollie, stop,” Daniel whispered. “Something’s wrong here. There aren’t any thornbushes or hanging vines or anything else. It’s a clear trail.”
“So?”
“So who made the trail?”
Mollie’s eyes grew wide as she understood Daniel’s meaning, and for the first time since embarking on this fool’s errand, Daniel allowed himself a little smile. Despite the danger, he couldn’t deny that detective work was exciting stuff.
He got down on his hands and knees and started searching the ground, examining the weeds and bushes on either side of the trail.
“What are you doing?” Mollie asked.
“Shine your flashlight down here; I need more light.”
It didn’t take Daniel very long to find what he was looking for—a broken sticker-bush twig. He took the twig gently between his fingers and held it up to the light, pointing to the break.
“See? The wood’s still green—that means the break is fresh. Someone’s been through here recently.” Mollie looked at Daniel, impressed. Daniel shrugged. “I read a lot.”
Mollie smiled at this; then she shone her light along the path, first in the direction of where they had come from, and then where they were headed.
“Then how come there aren’t any footprints?” she asked. “You can see ours clearly enough. You’d think that whoever broke that twig would’ve left some, too.”
She was right. Whoever had been using this path was careless enough to clear the vegetation out of his way, but not enough to leave prints.
“I don’t know,” said Daniel, feeling uneasy. “Maybe we’ll find the answer at the end of the trail.”
They started again down the path, more cautiously this time, and walked for another few minutes before the path ended abruptly at a sinkhole, half filled with putrid water. The hole was about five feet across, too wide to step over and even too wide to jump. Shining their lights, they could see the trail continue on the other side and wind its way off into the blackness.
Mollie pointed her flashlight at the foul-smelling water and made a face. “Who builds a trail that leads straight into a scum-filled hole? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’ve got me. But we’ll have to find a way around if we want to see where the rest of the path leads.”
Daniel started testing out the ground on either side of the sinkhole, looking for safe passage. He could hear Mollie tapping her foot in frustration and impatience.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” she said. Daniel almost let out a cry as she grabbed him around the waist.
“Mollie, what—”
“Just hold on.”
She lifted the two of them off the ground, and they flew up in an arc over the watery hole. As they landed on the other side with a thump, a thought occurred to Daniel. “Of course!”
“What?” asked Mollie.
“You just showed me the one way someone could travel up and down this path and not leave any footprints. I was stupid not to think of it earlier—they can fly.”
Mollie thought on this for a moment, but she didn’t look convinced. “Well, we know it’s not Eric, and we know it can’t be Michael. So if there’s another flier in Noble’s Green, I guess it’s about time I met them.”
They walked the rest of the way down the path until they reached the far northern wall of the quarry. There, atop a small hill and under a short rock overhang, was the opening to a cave.
A quick examination showed that the entrance was sturdy, and wide enough for a full-grown person to walk through without having to duck. It looked as if the tunnel went back about thirty or so feet before stopping at a dead end. This time Daniel went first. Mollie, being a flier, hated small spaces, so Daniel suggested she remain near the entrance.
Daniel crept along the dark passageway as silently as he could. Unfortunately, the tunnel echoed with every disturbed pebble. Gritting his teeth against the sound of his own steps, Daniel reached the end. So far the cave had been unremar
kable, a natural leftover from the days when men bored into this earth for stone, but here at the end was something else.
The tunnel didn’t stop on its own; rather, someone had stopped it. A large disk of solid rock blocked the pathway, like a manhole cover tilted on its side. Two great iron handles were bolted into its face, and the walls around it were scuffed and chipped, a clear indication that this thing had been moved repeatedly. But it would take someone with strength far beyond that of the strongest man to move it.
Daniel had just begun to search the cave wall for some kind of hidden lever when he caught sight of his own breath in the glow of his flashlight. He realized then that he had instinctively pulled his jacket closer. There was a new chill in the air.
Daniel turned his head and saw Mollie standing in the cave entrance, hugging her arms to her sides to keep warm. Just over her shoulder, silhouetted in the twilight, a black shape floated. A shape darker than the surrounding shadow, a shape that Daniel now had a name for….
The Shroud! His mind screamed the name, but his voice was caught in his throat, choked off by his fear. For an instant he couldn’t move, he was trapped in the memory of that night at Simon’s window, the terror of falling….
Mollie called to him, “Hey, did you find anything? Hurry up, it’s getting freezing out here.”
Daniel swallowed his fear and found his voice as the Shroud reached for Mollie. “Behind you!”
Until that moment, Daniel hadn’t known just how fast Mollie was. Not really. He had witnessed her speed in races with Eric, but what he saw before was nothing compared to what he saw now. Or more accurately, what he didn’t see—it all happened too fast. The Shroud reached out a ragged hand of shadow that barely brushed Mollie’s shoulder, and instantly she was gone. She must have felt the cold of that touch because Mollie turned into a flash—a girl-shaped blur that was at the cave entrance one second and standing next to Daniel, grabbing at his sleeve, the next.
“Ohmygosh Danielisthathim?” Mollie’s powers were so revved up that she was even speaking at super-speed. Daniel could barely make out her words.