The Yearbook (13 page)

Once again, smoke billowed from the crack.

“Okay, okay,” Reggie said. “I’ll shut up.”

“It’s … speaking to you!” I said.” The smoke …
that’s
what you interpret.”

The three looked at each other and nodded. “You are off to a good start,” Annabelle Spicer replied.

Ariana began to stir. Her eyes flickered open. “Oh … my … God.… Where am I?” She shot me a glance. “David!”

I hugged her tightly.

“How did it
taste,
Ariana?” Reggie asked. “No one has ever bitten Pytho before.”

Ariana gasped. Annabelle and Jonas were glaring at Reggie. More smoke erupted.

“Pytho,” I repeated.

Trembling, Ariana murmured, “Who are these jokers?”

“You may call us priests,” Annabelle replied.

“I know, we don’t look it,” Reggie said with a sigh. “The collars are at the laundry.”

“What do you want from us?” I asked.

“Not
us,
exactly,” Jonas answered. “We need one of you. We had planned for that one to be you, Mr. Kallas.”

“What about me?” Ariana said.

The three priests exchanged a glance.

I didn’t wait for them to answer. “It meant to devour you, like Jason and John and Rick. It murders by student numbers on the alphabetical list of seniors. That was one of the clues it gave us. You were next in the sequence, but you threw it off by biting it.”

“Hear! Hear!” Jonas cried. He began applauding, and the other two joined in.

I pulled the student list from my backpack and showed Ariana. “Look … the numbers double. Rick is 11, John is 22, Jason is 44, and you’re 88 — ”

Ariana grabbed the list and flipped back to the first page. “David, wait. Look who’s behind John Christopher on the list. Number 21.”

“Laura Chase …”
Pity, pity, Laura Chase,
her yearbook poem had begun.

“And here! Number 43, before Jason Herman — and 87.”

Number 43 was Butthead Heald. Number 87, the student before Ariana Maas, was Ed Lyman.

“The yearbook poems,” I muttered. “Every killing is off by one.”

“Every one
except Rick Arnold
!” Ariana replied. “Don’t you see?”

I didn’t.

“David, do you remember why I hired you for the yearbook?”

“Of course,” I said. “You needed someone to replace Sonya Eggert.”

Ariana nodded. “And what, happened to the student numbers when Sonya moved?”

I grabbed the list and flipped to the
E
section.

Sonya’s name was missing, but the numbering continued uninterrupted.

“Everybody after Eggert moved up,” I said.

“Right! The poems must have been written from the old list. This … this creature — Pytho — was being up to date.”

The three priests roared their approval.

“Excellent!” Annabelle cried.

“Then why weren’t the poems rewritten for the right people?” I asked.

“Because whoever sabotaged the book screwed up — ” Ariana gasped. “Of course! How could we have been so stupid?
Mr. DeWaart
did it! He was the last to handle the layout before it got to Mr. Brophy’s. He must have switched the photos and the poems in his car! When the yearbooks came out, he pretended to get all indignant and lied about Brophy. He’s like … your
slave
.”

The three cheered again. Reggie whistled wildly. “She’s smarter than you, Kallas.”

I was a little insulted. I
had
suspected Mr. DeWaart before.

“It’s rare to find a sacrifice who may also qualify as a priest,” Jonas remarked.

“Qualify as a priest?” Ariana looked horrified. “Wait a minute …”

Reggie quickly spoke up. “Okay, enough chitchat. Time’s a-wastin’. You-know-who is pretty bugged about the biting. If you don’t speak up, you could
both
be sacrificed. Dig? Nobody’s sacred down here, pal. Okay, now here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question — who
is
this smoky knucklehead beneath us?”

“Pytho,” I mumbled.

“You already know that,” Jonas interjected.

Three pairs of eyes stared at us intently. In the silence, the smoke was starting to abate, as if Pytho were holding its breath. Strains of singing floated down from above. The Delphic Club was still at that same stupid song.

Delphic.

Delphi.

An oracle lived there.
…
Songs were sung day and night.
…

Quickly I flipped the student list over and looked at the time line I had drawn:

1994 1950 1862 1686 1334 630 778 B.C.

That last date seemed to jump off the page. “Pytho wasn’t always in America,” I said.

Annabelle smiled. “Go on.”

“She was once in Ancient Greece,” I went on. “In Delphi. Under a crack in the earth. Her messages were interpreted then, too. By a priestess.”

The three priests stared silently. Ariana was gaping.

“And The Delphic Club — you
use
them. Like the singers in Ancient Greece. Pytho’s
entertainment.
They start their meetings, then the smoke changes them. And later they don’t remember a thing.…”

All three nodded solemnly.

I held up my time line to the three priests. “For some reason Pytho seems to rest for years, then emerge. But each rest is half as long as the one before. And when Pytho wakes, she takes someone. All three of you died mysteriously, in a year Pytho awoke!”

Ariana smiled, at me. “You figured that out?”

All three priests grinned their distorted, lumpy grins. “You passed the test of mental agility, David,” Jonas said. “Both of you seem worthy — ”

The ground gave up several puffs of smoke. Reggie, Jonas, and Annabelle all began to look uncomfortable.

“We can have only one priest,” Annabelle said.

Ariana grabbed my arm.

Smoke poured out of the crack.

“Separate, please,” Jonas said calmly.

“We won’t!” Ariana retorted.

Ariana’s arm was shaking (or maybe it was mine). I grabbed her tighter.

RRRRRRROMMMMM!

The ground shook. We both fell, letting go of each other.

“Don’t make him into one of you!” Ariana shouted.

“We may not,” Annabelle replied.

Ariana and I looked at each other. “Are you … going to let us go?” I asked.

“No,” Reggie said. “One of you stays with us, one doesn’t. Kids, it’s immortality … or lunch. And guess what? Pytho wants it to be your choice.”

S
WEAT WAS POURING DOWN
my brow, stinging my eyes.

I looked at Ariana. Her face was pale and haggard, streaked with tears. She reached out to me. “David?”

Her fingers were icicles. I took them and drew her closer.

With a sudden spasm, the ground lurched again.

“Let go of each other!” Reggie demanded.

I held her tighter. Rage welled up within me. Through clenched teeth, I said, “Go to hell, Reggie.”

A blast from below knocked us off our feet. We tumbled away from each other. Around us fell broken chunks of the wall.

I landed on my back, which was now ridged with bumps the size of ball bearings.

“Decide now!” Reggie shouted.

“David!” Ariana cried.

“Hold me!” I said. “Our togetherness hurts her.”

We struggled to our feet and clutched each other. “You decide, Pytho,” I shouted. “Which one of us should die?”

BOOOOOOOOMMMMM!

It felt as if an atom bomb had exploded. The priests’ column split.

As the three of them held on, the smoke screened them from our view. Clouds gathered around us, thickening to the consistency of gelatin.

Then, slowly, Ariana and I began to rise.

We both screamed. What we could see of the wall was crumbling, falling. Flakes of it embedded themselves into our platform.

We clung to each other. Our rise was slow and unsteady. We heard Jonas’s voice boom out: “When the pain gets too great — when the growths are too much to endure — only Pytho will be able to save you. And then you will come back. Begging.”

Pytho’s roar became more distant, until it was a low, agonized drone.

My fear was lifting. Relief washed over me like a summer rain. When the ledge came into view, we could see two figures peering over.

“David! Ariana!”

First we made out Chief Hayes’s face. A moment later we saw the other person: Mr. Sarro, slack-jawed, clutching a can of Coca-Cola with both hands.

“What the — ” Chief Hayes said. “Can you kids walk? Are you all right? How did you — what — ”

Mr. Sarro’s hands were trembling. Cola spurted from his can and fell to the ground. It landed on a broken-off chunk of Pytho’s wall, which sizzled. “Wh-what happened to their faces?” he stammered.

“Oh, no,” Ariana moaned. Her face was now covered with lumps. I ran my fingers over my own face and felt my heart sink.

When the growths are too much to endure
. . .

“Never mind,” Chief Hayes said. “Let’s get out of here. If there’s another tremor like that last one, I don’t want to be under this building.”

Holding hands, Ariana and I followed Chief Hayes and Mr. Sarro.

Pytho was quiet now, and the air had cleared somewhat. As we wound through the basement, Chief Hayes called over his shoulder, “You’re lucky I found you. I was called to a fender-bender down the road. Some kid jumped into a busy street, then tore off for the high school, according to a witness. The rest was cop’s intuition. I met Mr. Sarro when I got here.”

“DeWaart was running upstairs with these kids in costumes!” Mr. Sarro said. He struggled to steady his hand as he took a swig of soda.

A few more drops spilled to the ground. They hit another chunk of Pytho’s wall, and the chunk bubbled.

Ariana stopped. She was watching the bubbles intensely. When she looked up, her eyes were on fire.

“Guess what, guys?” she said. “We’re going back there.”

“Are you nuts?” I replied. “We’ll be killed.”

“No we won’t.” Ariana grinned wildly. “We’ll be armed.”

“T
HIS LOOKS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS,”
Chief Hayes muttered.

We sped down the deserted street. The trunk was ajar, holding seven cases of Coke and Pepsi with the help of a rope.

The backseat held another six, cases of two-liter bottles, the back window ledge another one, and the floor two more. If you added the one case on my lap, and the twenty-one in Mr. Sarro’s van, that made thirty-six cases.

We were lucky to get them. The A&P had been about to close. After the last tremor, people were gathering in open fields — away from trees, cars, and buildings.

On the way to the supermarket I had explained everything I knew to Chief Hayes — including Reggie Borden’s role. He hadn’t thought I was crazy. He had just nodded grimly and agreed with our plan.

Ariana had the job of convincing Mr. Sarro. Judging from the grin she gave me from the window of the van, everything had gone fine.

As for the Coca-Cola, well, she hadn’t wanted to explain in the supermarket, because she was afraid we would laugh at her. We just had to trust her.

At this point, nothing seemed too weird to try.

Mr. Sarro pulled into the school parking lot first. As we parked, he ran inside and Ariana opened the van doors.

“Ready, guys?” she called out.

“Ready for
what
?” Chief Hayes demanded, stepping out of the car. “We did what you wanted. Will you explain why we’re doing this — and slowly, so my aging brain can understand?”

“Okay.” Ariana thought for a moment. “What is the major substance in the human body?”

Chief Hayes rolled his eyes.
“Water.
Everybody knows that. What does that have to do with — ”

“The body is over ninety percent water,” Ariana went on. “We need to drink it all the time in order to survive. Now, supposing we imagine another life-form. For
its
survival it needs something just as intensely, but some
other
substance besides water.”

“I assume you’re talking about this … Pytho,” Chief Hayes said.

Ariana nodded. “You noticed the smell down there — ”

“Chalky,” Chief Hayes replied.

“Right!” Ariana said.

“It needs
chalk
to survive?” I asked.

“No, David,” Ariana groaned. “Look, how did you describe Rick Arnold’s body to me?”

“It looked as if something had sucked the bones right out — ”

“And what do bone and chalk have in common?”

“Calcium,” I murmured. “They’re made of calcium.”

“Or some form of it,” Ariana said. “Pytho is a calcium freak. Her tentacles, the walls around her, they’re all made of it. She takes it from her human sacrifices — ”

“Yeah, but if Pytho’s as big as you say, she’d have to kill the whole town to get enough,” Chief Hayes said.

Ariana shrugged. “I didn’t say I knew where she got it all.”

“From the soil,” I said.

“Huh?” Ariana and Chief Hayes both stared at me.

“It was in one of the articles I saved from 1950,” I said. “The soil was depleted of calcium, and no one knew why.”

We all looked toward the worn-out football field. “Sort of hard to know by looking, huh?” Chief Hayes remarked.

“I’ll bet if somebody measured right now, the soil would have the same problem,” Ariana suggested.

“Okay, genius,” I said, “so how do you explain these bony growths on all of us?”

Ariana shook her head. “I’m not sure. I think some part of Pytho— some weird germ or virus — is getting into our systems through the smoke. It affects whatever makes calcium in our own bodies.”

“Uh, before you completely lose me,” Chief Hayes said, “can we get back to this Coca-Cola business?”

“Have you ever put a tooth in a glass of cola, Chief Hayes?” Ariana asked.

“Uh, can’t say I have,” he replied. “Not recently.”

“Well, if you do, the tooth will disintegrate.”

“Something to do with the reaction of calcium with the carbonation and the acidity of the Coke,” I said.

Ariana stared at me. “How do
you
know?”

I shrugged. “Chemistry, I guess.”

Chief Hayes nodded. “And when Mr. Sarro spilled some of his Coke on that piece of slate …”

“Fsssshtt,”
Ariana said.