Demon High (20 page)

“Lucinda…?” Brittany her voice cracking. I could hear the scream there, suppressed but ready to come out. I could hear it because one was inside me too. I was reliving every trip I’d taken into a haunted house, the fake kind, the kind we were supposed to be at, helping to decorate. But this time I couldn’t tell myself it was all fake. I couldn’t convince my brain to be brave.

This place was real. Any horror we found here would be too.

Still, I forced my hand to tilt up more. The beam caught the object, caught the pale face and open mouth of a corpse swinging to and fro in front of us.

This time Brittany’s scream escaped.

I shoved her backward, back into the passageway and jerked a knife from my bag. It was a dual purpose knife; the handle formed a cross. I held it out in front of me as I ran the beam of the flashlight around the space.

To my right something moved.

I stepped back, ready to shove the blade into anything that got too close to me. I’d never stabbed anything more dangerous than Caldera High’s meatloaf surprise, but I was ready. Adrenaline hummed through me.

“Lucinda, it’s me.”

Oscar.

I didn’t lower the knife.

“I tried to get back here before you found….” Oscar glanced over his shoulder at the body swinging to and fro like a hypnotist’s watch.

“Where were you? What were you doing?” I asked. My voice was higher than it should have been, almost squeaky to my ears.

“I went ahead, as if I said I would. Holmes isn’t here, not on this floor anyway.” Oscar stepped toward me; his hands were up, but more in an attempt to calm me than in a defensive position.

From the corner of my eye I could see the body swinging, still in the same even back and forth motion. I didn’t want to look at it, but I had to. I glanced at Brittany. She hadn’t moved, but her gaze was glued to the body. I knew what she was thinking, wondering. Had we found her cousin? I lowered the knife and turned to face the body.

Oscar grabbed the corpse by the legs. Above the body’s head some mechanism clicked and clicked again, like a clock being wound backwards. After a few minutes the noise stopped and Oscar stepped away.

“It was rigged to swing,” he commented.

The boy was facing the side now. I was staring at its…
his
…side view rather than face on. It made it easier to approach him. I kept my flashlight lowered too, on his knees. I wasn’t ready to see his face, not yet.

He was wearing jeans, worn and stained with grass and mud. There was a bit of straw sticking out of the treads of his left shoe. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to look up.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I asked Oscar although I knew the answer. Oscar and Nellie had both said they didn’t sense anyone alive nearby.

“He’s dead,” Oscar confirmed. I nodded and raised the beam then. To my credit, the beam didn’t shake. Inside my head I was screaming, but on the outside I held it together.

The circle of light lit the corpse’s face. We all fell silent. Even bloated and with his mouth agape, I recognized the face, not Brittany’s cousin, but one of his friends.

Brittany said something behind me. I glanced at her. Her lips were moving in a silent chant or prayer; her hand formed the cross over her chest. Nellie took a step toward her, but Brittany moved away. She glanced up and caught my gaze. Hers was hollow. Not her cousin, but still a boy who a week earlier had been alive, who hadn’t deserved this.

I swallowed and wished I had faith to fall back on. But I had never been a believer. Not that there was someone looking out for me. Maybe because there hadn’t been anybody looking out for my mother.

I believed in demons. It was hard not to. They talked back to Mum and now me.

“How long’s he been dead?” I asked.

Oscar, back in his normal position, hands in pockets, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I was still holding the knife. I started to slip it back in my pack. Brittany seeing me, said, “We can’t leave him like that. We have to cut him down.”

I was thinking we needed to move on, find a way out ourselves and find the others if they were still alive. This boy was dead. What good would moving him to the ground do?

But Brittany was already moving forward. I realized this was important to her. She’d found a box and had placed it beside the body. She stepped up on it and held out her hand. Without being asked, Oscar wrapped his arms around the boy’s legs. I handed Brittany the knife and she sawed through the rope.

His body fell like a sandbag onto Oscar’s shoulder, but the demon took the weight as if it were nothing. He carried the boy’s body to the side of the room, near where we had entered and lay him out straight.

“Here.” Brittany pulled a scarf from her pocket, and Oscar spread it over the boy’s face.

I watched the whole thing feeling like an uninvited guest. Nellie cleared her throat. She was watching me with an expression eerily reflective of how I felt.

I had the knife back; I tapped it against my thigh. Holmes had just raised the stakes.

“How big is this room?” I asked. “And what’s beyond it?” Not waiting for a response, I started measuring off the space. It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough for a circle. I pulled out my chalk, ignoring my mother’s taunting voice in my head. No time for paint here.

It only took a minute to craft the circle. It took longer to convince Brittany to stay behind, safe inside it.

“I want to go,” she said. “It’s my fault too and Joshua is my cousin.” Her gaze wandered to the dead boy.

Joshua was her cousin; that was part of the problem. It was too personal. If we found him like this, I couldn’t trust that she would be able to stay in control. She was Brittany, but she was human too.

“You have the walkie talkie.” I set it down beside her inside the circle. “If I find a way out or need you, I’ll call.” I glanced over my shoulder. Nellie was watching us with studied indifference. Oscar was just waiting; I couldn’t tell if he was listening or not. I grabbed Brittany by the arm and pulled her close. “But don’t trust anyone. Not even me.”

“Not you? But then how—”

I cut her off. “A safe word. We need a safe word.”

She started to say something, but I stopped her. “Don’t say it out loud.” Nellie and Oscar seemed to be helping us, but they were still demons. “When we were little we used to play a game. We weren’t ourselves. Remember?”

Brittany nodded.

“There was something we both wanted to be. We’d fight over it. Remember?”

She nodded again.

I squeezed her arm. “If I come up to you or call you, but don’t say that thing, don’t come out of the circle. Swear it.”

She smiled. “Will you burn that sweater? The one with the stripes?”

I laughed; we both did. It was completely forced, of course, but still it helped relieve some tension. Then I stepped backwards out of the circle, chanting as I moved. I felt the energy slide into place, and for the first time since we had left this morning, I felt some element of control. I turned to Nellie.

“Want to test it?” I gestured to the white line.

“Thanks. I think I’ll take a pass. In fact, I think I’ll just stay over here and take a little rest.” She wandered to where the dead boy lay and sat down. Then holding my gaze, she placed her elbow on his back and leaned against him. “Not the fanciest of pillows, but it will do.”

Her calculated barb took hold, but I shook it off. I didn’t have time to be annoyed with Nellie. I turned my back on her and picked up my pack. Before leaving the room, I shot one last glance at Brittany. “Don’t let her in,” I mouthed.

Sitting cross-legged in the circle, her arms wrapped around her body, Brittany’s gaze shot to Nellie and stayed there for just a second. The she dropped her eyes to the floor.

I wished she’d have given me a positive response, a “Yes, Lucinda, whatever you say,” but I knew better than to wait for it. And Brittany was smart. Smarter than me. That had to be enough.

Oscar and I left; this time he stayed with me. He’d told me there was nothing else on this floor, no bodies, dead or otherwise, but I was still tense. Walking through the dark tends to do that too you, no matter how many assurances you get that the way is safe. And let’s face it, no matter what Oscar told me, only an idiot would have felt reassured.

The path continued to twist and turn. A few times the hall widened or narrowed. Each of those times, my heart thumped in my chest. I didn’t want to find Brittany’s cousin or the other boy, not like the last one. And Angela…. I pulled a breath in so deeply through my nose, I felt my nostrils flare.

After what felt like hours, but was probably minutes we hit a dead end.

Oscar stopped and turned. With my flashlight shining on him, he looked unnaturally pale. He held out both hands. “The path seems to end here.”

The information Brittany and I had found on Holmes said he liked trap doors and secret passages. I played the flashlight’s beam up and down the walls, looking for a seam. I saw nothing.

“What are you doing?” Oscar angled his eyes, following my motions.

“Looking for a door.”

“Like this?” He squatted down and jerked on the baseboard. It wasn’t until I saw the wall in front of me moving upward that I realized the bottom edge of the trim wasn’t even. An indentation, or hand hold, had been carved out of its bottom side.

Beyond the wall was an old metal staircase, probably original to the building. Glass block windows let in some light. They were dirty and thick, impossible to break if we needed a fast exit, but they were there. I flipped off my flashlight and let my eyes adjust to the gloom.

Oscar stepped inside and gazed up. I followed him, my backpack whacking against him as I moved into the small space.

“Thanks for the tip,” I muttered.

“What?” His eyebrows rose, and his eyes widened.

“Nothing.” I shook off my annoyance. Demon. Oscar was a demon. I had to keep reminding myself that. Any help I got from him had to be thought of as a bonus. Expecting it was dangerous.

We were half way up the stairs, creeping to keep the sound of our steps from ringing out on the metal steps, when I realized something.

“Holmes knows we’re here, doesn’t he?” I asked.

Oscar, walking in front of me, stopped and turned. “That’s my guess. You at least. Unless he’s watching, he wouldn’t know about Nellie or me.”

But we already knew Holmes was watching, at least odds pointed that way. I cursed myself for not having Brittany get more information from the security guy on exactly how many cameras there were.

I studied Oscar for a few seconds, really studied him. He seemed so damn human. He had yet to do anything that caused me not to trust him, never mind fear him.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the stairs?” I asked.

He leaned against the metal banister. I could only see his silhouette in the gloom, not the details of his expression, but I knew what it was, sad and detached.

“You know a lot about demons, don’t you, Lucinda?”

I licked my lips, not sure where this was going and afraid I wasn’t going to like it. Then I realized something. The reason I was having such a hard time remembering Oscar was a demon was because I didn’t want him to be one.

Apparently unaware of the light bulb that had gone off in my head, Oscar kept talking. “And you know I was human. Do you know how humans become demons?”

Words tumbled out of my mouth. “Sell their souls or die when they are at their lowest, when they don’t care about anything.”

He smiled then. I couldn’t see it. I felt it. The hairs on my arms stood up. I rubbed them back down.

“I didn’t sell my soul. I just didn’t care, and as much as I like you, I still can’t. I can’t care, not about you, Angie, or any of this.”

“So, you didn’t tell me about the stairs because….”

“Because there was no reason to.”

“But when I asked you—”

“There was no reason not to.”

I let that soak in for a second. What he said made sense in some strange twisted way.

“So, you’ll tell me everything I ask, but not necessarily offer anything?”

He seemed to consider the question. “I don’t see why not.”

I took a breath. “Oscar, is Holmes in the building?”

“I haven’t seen him,” he replied.

“How about the other boys and Angie, can you sense them now?”

“No.”

For a moment, my hopes plummeted, and then I remembered he’d only been able to sense the bottom floor before, not any floors above it.

“Is it because they aren’t here or because something is blocking you?”

He took a step down. “Blocking. Something is blocking me. Standing here in this stairwell, all I can sense is you.”

He was only one step above me now. He held out his hand and without thinking, I slipped mine into his. “All I can sense is you, Lucinda, and I don’t care. The others could be dead or dying, and I don’t care.”