The Yearbook (12 page)

I needed some comic relief. I smiled. I read about the witch-hunts, the quotes about “crag-faced hags” and “demented children” and “secret lairs.”

And as I turned the page, my eye caught the smoking black cloak again. I wondered what was in it. Dry ice? Burning rubber?

I glanced toward the clock. Mrs. Klatsch was climbing down a spiral staircase into the library’s storage area below. I had a sudden urge to pull her back. Spiral staircases into basements were making me nervous.

That was when I knew.

I looked at the picture again. My mouth dropped open.

It wasn’t a black cloak.

It was a gash. In the ground.

The third voice was female.

I scribbled Annabelle Spicer’s name.

“Yes!” I cried out.

On a chair to my left, an old man awoke with a start and dropped his newspaper. I wrote:

1994 1950 1862 1686

Was there a pattern?

I was suddenly gripped with acute stomach pain. Waves of nausea.

I was going to have to use math.

And I did. Without a calculator. Sweaty palms and all.

The first two dates were 44 years apart. The next two were 88, and the next 176.

The gaps were shrinking by half.

Half-life.

“And the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone,” I sang to myself as I figured out the remaining gaps. I filled in my time line all the way back to 778
B.C.
I felt like continuing back to the Jurassic Era, but I cut it short. Wetherby was settled in 1634, so anything earlier was useless.

The library clock said 11:43. Ariana was late.

But it didn’t matter. I was on a roll.

On a hunch, I turned over the student list and circled the names of the three victims.

Hmmm

I counted the letters in the three victims’ names: 13, 15, 11.

Dead end.

I said the names aloud. I tried rearranging letters.

Then I ripped out each entry, including all three columns: alphabetical number, the name, and method of payment:

“Oh my lord . . .”

Slimy kept its patterns simple.

First dates, than student numbers.

All ending in death.

I tried to swallow, but my throat felt as if I’d stuffed a sock into it. As I lifted a page of the list, my hands shook.

The next victim was Lucky Number 88.

Words and numbers floated on the page. I blinked and tried to focus.

Then I saw the name.

M
Y EYES SHOT TOWARD
the clock.

12:15.

Ariana should have been at the library by now.

Where was she? I had to warn her.

I fumbled around in my pocket for change for the pay phone. I was broke.

I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Klatsch walking up the spiral staircase.

“Mrs. Klatsch,” I said, barely containing my voice. “Can I use your phone for a local call?”

“Qui
…
et
…
ly.”

I grabbed the receiver and punched Ariana’s number.

No answer.

Easy, David, I told myself. Keep it together. Think.

She’d said she was going to call Smut, to straighten out their argument. Something unexpected must have happened.

Under Mrs. Klatsch’s disapproving gaze, I tapped Smut’s number on the phone.

“ ’lo?”

“Hi, Lily?” (Lily is Smut’s eleven-year-old sister.)

“Yeah.”

“Can I speak to your brother?”

“He left.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Was anyone with him?” I asked.

“Uh … yeah.”

I wanted to strangle her. “Who?”

“That guy. The yearbook teacher. He picked Stephen up.”

“Mr. DeWaart?”

“I guess.”

“Lily, was Ariana with them?”

“Uh-uh. She called too late.”

“You mean, she called your house after they left?”

“Yeah.”

“And you told her where Smut had gone?”

“Huh? Who’s
Smut?”

“No one. Thanks.”

I slammed the receiver down. I stuffed my books and papers into my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and bolted toward the front door.

“Is something wrong?” Mrs. Klatsch called out.

“I’ll tell you later!” I shouted.

I raced out of the library. I knew where Ariana had gone. After she talked to Lily, she panicked. She assumed The Delphic Club was having a meeting — and she went to head them off at the high school.

To warn Smut. To protect him.

Instead, she was walking right into a deathtrap.

My feet pounded the pavement. I could feel the blood rising to my face, gorging behind my eyes. I was furious at Smut, furious at Ariana, and scared out of my mind at what might be happening.

Screeeak!

I was in the street. I saw headlights. I heard a horn. A scream.

Then I felt myself flying. Briefly.

I landed on the sidewalk. Behind me I heard the sound of shattering glass.

“Are you all right?”

A balding man in a tweed jacket was looking at me with a pale expression. Two cars had jumped the curb and hit a light post. One driver was cursing a blue streak.

“Yeah. Fine.”

I was halfway down the block when I heard police sirens.

The school parking lot was a straight three-block run. Mr. DeWaart’s car was sitting there. Just beyond it, one of the school’s back doors was propped open with a trash can. I ran inside and snaked through the hallways to the backstage door. Yanking it open, I headed for the spiral staircase.

I could hear singing as I started to descend. I had never heard the tune. It was beautiful, but it sent a chill up my spine.

I clattered to the bottom and raced through the open bookcase. I rounded the corners, sped through the grafitti-covered chambers. The mist was swirling, spiraling at my side, seeming to point me in the right direction.

Then, suddenly, I saw them.

The Delphic Club. Singing at the top of their lungs, each member dressed identically in gray, flowing robes. Their arms were linked, and they swayed back and forth to the tune.

I stopped in my tracks. I was in their line of vision, but no one seemed to notice me. Their eyes were glazed. They seemed to be under some spell.
What were they doing?

Just beyond them, clouds of smoke spewed upward from the crevice. From their midst emerged a black form, smiling, arms held upward.

I recognized Mr. DeWaart’s face before he saw me. In the dim light, his beard seemed thickly sinister, his face cragged and shadowy. He sang with the swaying group, in a deep baritone.

“Wartface,” I said under my breath.

Mr. DeWaart stopped singing. His eyes betrayed no surprise as he looked at me. “I have always found that nickname puerile.”

“But they’re not warts, are they?”

He smiled. “Not any more than the one on your forehead.”

Suddenly more pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. I stared at Mr. DeWaart, trying to put my mounting anger into words. “You
were
the one — ”

A scream cut me off. Even in the soupy murk, it was earsplitting.

And it was unmistakably Ariana’s.

“No!”
I bellowed.

“Stay here, David,” Mr. DeWaart said with eerie calmness. “You can’t change destiny.”

I ran past him. The smoke enveloped me, smothered me with its chalky sweetness. I pushed through, fighting for breath.

Ariana was shrieking my name.

I followed her voice, groping at the cloud with my arms. “I’m here!”

I saw the crevice, a vague dark line in the whiteness. Ariana was nearby. I flailed blindly in the direction of her voice.

Then I touched something.

Cold. Wet. Clammy smooth. And pulsing.

I tried to yank my hand back, but the snake was wrapping itself around my wrist.

I grabbed it with my other hand and pulled. My fingers slipped off, coated with a drippy white ooze.

On the smoke-slickened floor, my feet began sliding toward the hole. I dropped to my knees.

“David!
David!”
Ariana screamed. “I see you!”

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. Something was around my chest now. Squeezing, lifting me off the ground. I floated over the crevice. In the eddies of smoke I could see a flickering form. It grew closer, jerking frantically.

“A — ri
—
ana!”
I rasped.

She was clear now, between the cottony puffs. The tentacles had trapped her like a vine around a fence post. Through the maze I could see her eyes, sparked with anger.

Her teeth flashed briefly. With a savage thrust, she buried them in the fleshy skin of the tendril.

White-yellow goop exploded in a fountain. The tendril recoiled from Ariana, ripping itself from her mouth.

What followed was beyond noise. The blast of agonized sound boxed my ears. The tentacle that had wrapped me suddenly loosened. My torso slipped downward, out of its clutches.

I was falling freely, through a sea of writhing tendrils, with nothing below to catch me.

I blacked out, and my blind panic began to splinter and fall away, replaced by a gathering dream.

BENIGN TUMORS.

Irregular growth.

Crowding cranial nerves.

Inoperable.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be reading that stuff.”

Mark hasn’t heard his foster father enter the room. Walter Ojeda looks concerned. He surveys the open boxes of papers and books
—
all stuff Mark had found in the attic of his parents’ house.

For years the attic door had been padlocked, but the movers had been only too happy to help Mark break the lock. They had not been quite so happy to
move
the cardboard boxes Mark had found upstairs, which were black with mildew, gnawed by mice, coated with bat guano.

But they had. And they had stacked all of them in Mark’s new bedroom, at the Ojeda house, earlier that morning.

Now Mark is transfixed. The boxes, neatly labeled in his Yiayia’s handwriting, are full of his parents’ papers. Bills, newspaper clippings, photos, medical records (lots of those), old report cards, you name it.

Both his parents had been very, very sick. The doctors had been baffled. The tumors had not been cancerous, but they were out of control, related to something called neurofibromatosis
…
Some doctors had conjectured his mom and dad had been exposed to harmful radiation levels; the odds of a husband and wife
both
developing so many tumors coincidentally were one in millions.

But what puzzles Mark the most is
how
they died. A few condolence letters to Yiayia refer to “mysterious circumstances,” and a letter from some retired policeman apologizes for the “unexplained disappearances.” Newspaper articles detail a court case against the same policeman for negligence. It seems he found the bodies
—
his mom’s and dad’s
—
but then they vanished. Poof.

Was it a murder? A crooked deal with the cop gone wrong? A double-suicide of two depressed, terminally ill people?

Was there any proof of death?

Mark hasn’t even gone through a quarter of
t
he stuff when Walter Ojeda decides to wander in and demonstrate his concern.

“I can handle it,” Mark says. “Shouldn’t I know about my parents?”

“Of course,” his foster father replies, looking around. “But … well, it’s bound to be more depressing than enlightening, don’t you think?”

“If I want to be depressed, that’s my choice,” Mark snaps. “All this stuff was kept from me. I have a right to see it.”

Ojeda sits at the edge of the bed, near a box marked HIGH SCHOOL — 1990–1994. “I don’t mean to be cruel,” he says gently, “but it’s in the past, Mark, and it belongs there.”

“Okay, thanks, Mr. Ojeda — ”

“Walter … or Dad, if you like.”

“Thanks, Walter.”

Mark watches the man walk from the room. Ojeda looks nervous, as if he expects a rat to jump out of one of the boxes.

As the door shuts, Mark opens one of the boxes on his bed.

Inside are four yearbooks
—
freshman, sophomore, junior, senior — in perfect condition.

M
Y EYES BLINKED OPEN.
The people in my dream — all familiar, yet all so strange — faded away.

Under me was a floor of hardened, slimy muck — the same yellowish stuff from which the tentacles were made. Distant walls rose around me, sweating yellow fluid. The smoke seemed to cling to the walls, rising upward to an opening I could not see.

Ariana was beside me, limp and unconscious. Her clothes were ripped, her backpack covered with slime.

I cradled her in my arms. She was breathing, and a hard lump had sprouted just below her left ear.

“Ariana,” I whispered.

She groaned, nestling her head into my chest.

“A lovely couple, indeed.”

I looked toward the voice.

Not far from Ariana and me, a sturdy column loomed high, rising out of the floor like a tree trunk. In front of it was a thin crack in the floor’s surface. At the top, the column branched into three parts. On each branch sat a person — an older white man, a young white woman, and a teenaged black man. Each wore an identical, plain robe. Their smiles were grotesque, distorted by the lumps that covered their faces.

“Jonas Lyte,” I said. “Annabelle Spicer … Reggie Borden. ”

The crack in the ground belched smoke.

“Ehhhhh!
You have answered the identity question!” That was Reggie, imitating a talk-show host.

Jonas Lyte gave him a stern look.

Reggie shrugged. “Hey, I picked up a lot when I was aboveground. I would have been a great
Jeopardy
contestant.”