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“Love you, Reed,” she said.
My throat closed. I hadn’t told my mother I loved her many times in my life. She’d spent most of my childhood on her back in bed, hopped up on prescription drugs and blaming my entire family for her sucky situa
tion. Since she’d gotten sober last year, the words had been uttered between us more frequently, but now I was finding them harder than ever to say. Now that I knew she’d been lying to me about who my father was my entire life.
But then, I could be the next to go missing. If I didn’t say it now, when would I have the chance again?
“Love you too, Mom. And Dad,” I added quickly, clutching the phone so tightly it almost slipped out of my grasp like a greased pig.
“We’ll see you at the big party,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “Be safe.”
“I will.”
I hung up the phone, shoved it in the back pocket of my jeans, and grabbed my pillow. Outside the open door of my room, girls rushed past with their backpacks and laundry bags, their teddy bears under their arms, their cell phones pinned to their ears. As I tossed my pillow toward my packed bag, I noticed the long, dingy laces of my favorite sneakers sticking out from under my bed and dropped to my knees to fish them out.
I pulled out the first shoe but had to flatten myself on the floor to dig for the other. As I grabbed it, my fingers grazed the edges of some folded papers. Grasping them between my thumb and forefinger, I tugged them out. As soon as I saw what they were, I sat back hard on my butt. The pages were thick and yellowed, frayed along one edge as if they’d been torn from a book. I unfolded them in my lap, and one hand fluttered to my mouth.
It was Eliza’s handwriting, though slightly more haphazard and seemingly rushed than usual. From the size and the texture, I could tell that these were the pages that were missing from the BLS book. Suddenly I recalled the fluttering noise of falling papers the other night, when I’d woken from one of my nightmares. These must have been tucked somewhere inside the book of spells and tumbled out that night.
There was a commotion out in the hallway as someone dropped their suitcase and it burst open all over the floor. I got up shakily and closed the door, then sat down on my bed. Breathlessly, I began to read the pages.
I gulped in a breath. Eliza’s terror poured off the pages. Pressing my lips together, I read on. Each line was like a fresh knife to my heart. Painstakingly, Eliza told the story of Caroline Westwick, a girl who had attended Billings a few years before Eliza had gone there, and about the coven Caroline’s sister Lucille had started. She told of how Lucille wouldn’t let Caroline in, and how Caroline had taken it personally, stolen the books, and cast spells on herself until she’d gone mad. She wrote that Caroline had committed suicide, throwing herself off the roof of the Easton chapel, and that her final words were “I don’t belong.”
The next few paragraphs told of how Eliza, Theresa Billings, Catherine White, and Alice Ainsworth had formed a coven of eleven girls. Some of the girls were apparently reluctant but were convinced by Theresa’s cunning. She described the night they had read the incantation, and what had happened just after the words were spoken.
My hand clutched my stomach. The light had gone out, and then their individual candles had flickered back to life. Just like that night in the chapel basement. Just like the night Ivy and I had said the incantation as well. My brain swam and I closed my eyes, holding back a wave of nausea. This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Outside in the hallway a door slammed, and I opened my eyes, forcing myself to continue.
There were stories of fun spells—a boy with boils on his hands, a headmistress with a wayward skirt. Stories of celebrations with the coven, retellings that sounded so much like the gatherings I’d had with my own friends it was almost eerie. And then, just as I was feeling comfortable again, another part stopped me cold.
Eliza had dreamed that her friend Theresa and the maid, Helen Jennings, had thrown Catherine White into a ditch in the woods, killing her. And then, just a few nights later, Catherine died in almost that exact way. She was fighting with Theresa when Eliza happened upon them: A spell had gone wrong, and Catherine had fallen to her death.
I leaned back against my bed, trying to breathe. Catherine had died? All those times I’d read through the BLS book, I’d imagined the two of them together, hanging out on the Billings campus, reading books and flirting demurely with hot turn-of-the-century boys. But from the date on the entry, Catherine and Eliza had barely known each other a month when she’d died.
But this wasn’t the worst realization of all. Eliza had a horrible nightmare that had sort of come true. Now I’d had two horrible nightmares that had sort of come true. Did this mean that Astrid had really been kidnapped? That Lorna was really … dead? My heart all but stopped inside my chest and I bent forward at the waist, fighting for breath as I was assaulted by the horrifying images from my dreams. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
I looked down at the pages in my hands and wished I had never found them. Whatever this was, I couldn’t handle it. Whatever it was, I wished it was happening to anyone other than me.
After taking a few deep breaths, I forced myself to sit up straight again. Part of me didn’t want to read any further, but I knew that I had to. I had to know. Stoically, silently, I read. I read about the coven bringing Catherine back to life. About how it had turned out to be some kind of monster and not Catherine at all. How the thing had attacked Eliza. How Helen and Theresa had saved her. How the thing had cursed all of them, and all of their ancestors, before finally falling over dead.
I felt sick and scared and confused. Did I really live in a world where things like this could happen? I felt like I was reading a horror novel, not a diary. But these things had actually happened to Eliza—or at least, she believed that they had. The sorrow as she described the night she and her friends had brought Catherine’s body back to the site of her original death was so real. The description of how they’d buried the trunk full of books, and how Eliza had thrown the locket in the ditch as well, was detailed and vivid. As I read these last words, my hand touched the chain around my neck.
If Eliza had been so done with it, if she’d hated it enough to throw it away, why had she led me right back to it?
The second the thought crossed my mind, I scoffed at myself and got up off the floor. A thick fog cleared rapidly from my brain as I extricated myself from the fantasyland of Eliza’s story and planted my feet firmly in the real world.
This was crazy. This whole thing was making me certifiable. A ghost hadn’t led me anywhere. It was impossible. I was falling for all of this like some gullible moron, but it couldn’t be true. No truer than Cheyenne sending me e-mails from the grave or leaving me spooky presents to find. All of that had had a reasonable explanation—Sabine had been trying to scare me. Clearly something similar was going on now. Someone was messing with me. It was the only explanation.
But how did they get inside your dreams, Reed? A little voice inside my head asked. What about the dreams?
Suddenly my door swung open and my heart hit my throat. Noelle looked me up and down.
“Get your coat on. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” I said. I closed my eyes and held out the pages to her. “Please just read this. Just read it and tell me I’m not going crazy.”
Noelle sighed with impatience but took the pages. As she began to read, all the color drained from her face. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s Eliza’s,” I said. “It fell out of the book of spells. I’m pretty sure the pages were torn out of the BLS book at some point. Who knows when?”
