Secret of the Sevens (6 page)

Ten

My hair is still damp from the shower and I'm wheezing when I reach the library. It's two minutes to 7:00. Where the heck is she?

The note from the Sevens said something about the rear elevator. I dart for the back of the building, dodging bookcases and pissed librarians. I turn the corner and see Laney in the distance, pushing the
up
button. She steps inside the elevator and disappears.

I shout, “Hold the door,” but it's already closing. Frantic, I shove my hand inside the narrow opening and the doors bang my elbow.

“Owwww.” The elevator slowly opens and I collapse against the edge, clutching my sore arm and panting. “You were … gonna leave … without me?”

Laney yanks me inside. “Talan, you scared me to death. Can't you ever be on time?”

I massage my elbow. “So … what do we do now?”

Laney pulls her copy of the note from her pocket. “I've been thinking about this all day and I think I figured it out.” She moves in close to me. “See how it says: ‘Close with two. Seven times the LL. Seven times the HELP'?” Her eyes lift to mine. “I think ‘close with two' means we push the elevator button for the second floor.”

She leans over and presses the
2
button on the panel before glancing back at the note. “‘Seven times the LL' must mean we hit the button marked LL seven times.” She bends over and counts out loud as she punches the button for the lower level seven times.

She checks the paper again while I put my hands on my knees to catch my breath.

“The next instruction is ‘Seven times the help.' That's got to be the button with the bell. It looks like the word ‘help' used to be on it but it's worn off a little.”

She's right. When I lean close, I can make out the letters.

Laney pushes the help button seven times. The elevator lurches hard. The light reads that we're bound for floor 2, but the elevator's actually dropping. It rattles and clangs before stopping abruptly. We reach out for each other to steady ourselves. A moment later, the lights dim.

Now my heart is pounding harder than it did on the sprint over here.

There's a tremble in Laney's voice that doesn't help. “Oh no. I hope we didn't break it.”

“We?”
I smack at the open-door button, but it doesn't move. “I knew this was a joke.” I press the help button next, but nothing happens so I pound on the door.

All of a sudden, there's a loud creak behind us. We spin around and watch the back panel of the elevator disappear. It slides completely off to the left, revealing a small, shadowy room behind it.

Holy. Shit.

We latch onto each other like magnets. I can feel her heartbeat racing mine as we stare into the darkness.

After a minute, we unclench and awkwardly back away from each other.

“Still think it's a joke?” she mutters.

She squeezes my wrist and creeps out the back of the elevator, slowly dragging me with her. The elevator casts enough light to show crumbling, red-brick walls around us. The dank, musty room is suffocating and I'm seriously ready to call this whole thing off. My chest lifts and falls with heavy breaths. We take a few more steps and my foot knocks something over on the concrete floor. Two high-beam flashlights roll at our feet.

“What the hell?” I mutter.

As we bend over to pick them up, the elevator doors whip closed and it starts to ascend. We fumble to get the flashlights turned on and the minute we do, the dark space is shattered with beams like we're announcing the grand opening of a new morgue.

“Hello?” Laney calls out.

Silence
. This is creepy. Like a horror film, and I'm one of those idiots who's gone down into the haunted basement to see what the noise is instead of running like hell. The flashlight's decently heavy, but a little pepper spray or some brass knuckles would be nice about now. Hell, I'd take holy water in a spray bottle at this point.

Delaney's beam settles on the farthest wall. “There's a tunnel there. Do you see it? Everything else is solid brick.” Her face tightens. “God Talan, what should we do?”

Fear creeps into my voice. “What do you mean, what should we do? You're the brainiac.” I flick my flashlight at the empty elevator shaft. “I hate to say it, but it looks like our ride left without us.”

“Let me think for a minute.” Laney concentrates on the note, her face as grim as the room around us.

The muscles in my back and neck grow tense. “The darkness is really freaking me out,” I confess. “I think I should tell you—”

Her head jerks up. “That's it—the darkness! The poem!”

“Huh?”

“The poem we had to memorize: ‘When darkness fills you up with fright, tread straight, straight, straight into the night.' We're supposed to go straight into the tunnel.”

“Are you insane? What if it's a furnace or something?”

“It's not a furnace, it's a utility tunnel. I gave parent tours for student council last year, and we talked about how this was a small college before William Singer bought the property. A lot of older colleges used underground tunnels to deliver coal and stuff between the buildings.”

“Okay, fine, so it's a utility tunnel. Where does it go?”

“There's only one way to find out.”

She takes my arm and tows me forward, but I yank it free. “Wait! I need to tell you something. I, uh … I'm claustrophobic. I don't know if I can do this.”

She gives me her
shut up Talan
look and reaches for my hand, but I jerk it away.

Her jaw drops. “Oh. I'm sorry. I thought you were joking. Wait—we've lived half our lives together and I never knew that? How come you never mentioned it before?”

I rub my hands together so she doesn't see them shake. “Why would I tell anyone that?”

“Well, how come you were fine in the elevator?”

“Elevators are bright and the ride is short. I hate dark, closed spaces. They freak me out.” The muscles in my back and neck feel like rocks.

“I'm sorry.” She stares up the shaft where the elevator abandoned us. “I don't know what else we can do, though. That tunnel is our only way out now.” She walks over to the passageway and shines her light down it. “The hallway is a decent size, if that helps. It's just dark.” She looks back at me, pity in her eyes.

My stomach rumbles like the washing machine when I stuff too much in there.

“Are you going to be okay?” Her eyes scan the walls again, looking for anything she might have missed. When they land back on mine, they're full of concern. “Do you want to wait here? I can go alone and try to find a way out.”

“No, I'm okay.”
Except for my exploding heart and the radioactive nausea building in my gut.
“We'll go together.”

She comes alongside me and hooks her arm around mine, squeezing it tight. “I'll help you the whole time, don't worry.”

I want to pretend I'm fine, but it's no use. One step in and the tunnel feels tighter than a noose. I take deep breaths and shuffle down the passage.

Our beams of light bounce around an arched passageway lined with disintegrating bricks. It's humid and stuffy, like a clammy summer night by a dirty river. The deeper we go, the more the air reeks of mildew and decay, a cross between vomit and rotting fish. I swallow to keep from gagging, but it's no use. My stomach is already upset. I pull my arm away, spin around, and puke all over the wall.

Laney rubs my back, but I nudge her hand away. Between gags, I warn her, “If you tell anyone about this I swear I'll kill you, Shanahan.”

She strokes my shoulder. “Of course I wouldn't tell anyone.”

I'm humiliated and pissed and I swear the minute I figure out who's behind this, I'm going to pummel them until they're throwing up too. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and steady myself against the wall. I figure Laney will gag at the sight and smell. Instead, she wedges herself under my arm and helps me up.

“C'mon.” She squeezes my hand. “You can do this. I'm here for you.”

“Do you have any toothpaste?” I give her a weak smile. I'm clammy and shaky, but I don't want her to let go. Her voice and touch soothe me.

As we continue down the hall, my stomach settles a little. After a while, we stumble on an intersection.

“Should we turn or keep going forward?” she asks.

I think for a minute. “Don't turn. The poem said straight, remember? ‘Straight, straight, straight into the night.'”

“Oh, that's right. Nice catch, Talan.”

I breathe through my nose and walk on, trying to concentrate on anything but the walls trapping me in this underground prison. I think about the way Laney's soft hair tickles my neck as she leans into me, and how good she always smells, even in this sewer hole. Like lavender.

I'm not even sure what a lavender is; I just remember reading the word on a bottle of her lotion once. Laney was sitting at a chair in the kitchen, slowly rubbing the cream on her bare legs, and I was watching her, thinking … well … never mind.

We pass another tunnel to the left, and then another. A few more feet and Laney steps right into a nasty web. She karate chops the air and wiggles around until she's sure she's shaken every bit of it off her. I lean against the wall and laugh weakly until a humongous roach races across my shoe. To say I scream like a little girl is an insult to little girls. I yelp like a Chihuahua, kicking and shaking my foot like I'm putting out a fire.

Whatever tough guy reputation I once had is now trashed. But it's Laney, right? What do I care what Shanahan thinks? Still, my face burns when she laughs and says, “I didn't know you could River Dance.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn't know you were an epileptic ninja.” I imitate her martial arts moves.

She laughs even harder, and it feels like some kind of prize. Slowly, she catches her breath, smiling and staring at me with a weird expression. She rubs the back of her neck, clears her throat, and steps toward me, gently slipping her arm around mine again. “Let's go.”

We march ahead, a little faster now. I don't say it out loud, but all my fears rush back about this secret society thing. What were we thinking? The last group of Sevens were murderers. For all we know, we could be the next victims instead of the next pledges. No one even knows we're here. Who would find us if we just made the biggest mistake of our lives and climbed into our own underground graves? I'd turn and run but I know Laney wouldn't follow, and I can't leave her here.

We come up to a wall and Laney swivels her flashlight from side to side. “It's a T-intersection. Which way now?”

“The next line of the poem is ‘Left, right, left—the soldier's pace.' I think that means our next turns are left, right and left.”

With our arms linked together, we veer left, armed with only our flashlights.

I squeeze Laney's arm tight, and her voice reassures me. “There's our next turn up ahead.”

We swing down a passageway to our right and plod on a few more minutes more before another tunnel comes up. “We take this left,” I remind her.

We creep another hundred yards before Laney blurts out, “The quiet is spooking me. Let's talk about something, okay? So … so what's with the claustrophobia? Since when have you had claustrophobia?”

“Since I was little. My mother locked me in a closet once and forgot about me.”

Why did I tell her that? I've never told anyone that.

Suddenly, Laney's not so chatty. She stares up at me, waiting for me to elaborate.

“The day DCFS removed me from our home, the social worker guessed that I'd been there almost two days. Mom thought I'd be okay while she went to score drugs. She hadn't planned on getting arrested.”

Laney squeezes my arm tighter. I gotta admit, I don't really mind right now. Still, I'm eager to change the subject. “So can I ask you a question, Laney? Since I'm risking my life, following dicey instructions given to us by a secret society that murdered for profit, do you think you can at least explain to me why this is so important to you?”

“I'll tell you if you tell me why you need the money so bad.”

When I don't answer, she says, “Okay then, let me guess. Gambling debt? Child support payments? No, I know. To pay for rehab for your cereal addiction.”

I try to come up with one of my typical, smart-ass answers, but I'm too fixated on the darkness to be clever. “The money is for me.”

She slips her hand out from my arm. “Of course.” Her voice carries an edge now. “I should have guessed. Money you'll probably blow on vodka and girls.”

“Vodka? Money I'll
probably
blow on rent and ramen.”

Her squinty eyes travel up and down me. “What do you mean?”

“Not everyone has a mommy and daddy to take care of them, Laney. You know the deal. Once you graduate, you're done at Singer. My free ride is over the second they hand me my diploma. I have no family to go back to and I'm not going to college. I'll be homeless again. Did you ever think of that? Because I think about it every day.”

“Oh … ”

I turn and walk ahead so I don't have to face her pity eyes.

“Mom and Dad would help,” she blurts out, behind me. “Or maybe the school could—”

“No.” I spin around. “The school will forget about me. And you and your parents will forget about me. Just like my father, whoever the hell he was, forgot about me. Just like Gram, who dumped me at Singer and my mother, who forgot me in the closet. I can take care of myself.”

My chest tightens so much it hurts. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

I walk away, but she catches up and touches my sleeve. “We'll figure something out.”