This was an area of expertise I was good at. I opened a cabinet and started pulling out files, searching through the information. Kallie and Marcus helped me, starting in on different sides of the room. Charlie had brought his glasses, and used them to read some of the shorter files aloud.
Charlie remained close as I went through the files, though he kept jumping, as if he was hearing things. Oberi pulled files out and laid them on my lap for me to look at, but I tossed each one on the floor after scanning them quickly. Out of all the gruesome deaths and horrible crimes noted, none of these prisoners fit the bill.
“Where’d they put all these people?” Marcus asked. “They killed a lot of prisoners on this property. Did they just throw them in the lake or what?”
“By these files, the guards buried them everywhere in unmarked graves,” Kallie replied. “There wasn’t a set cemetery or burial ground to put them in, so wherever they landed is where they were buried.”
“Makes sense. The guards take the kids who die in fight club and toss them in the woods in shallow graves, or into the siren lake if they’re feeling particularly gruesome,” Charlie said. “I’m not surprised they didn’t care about these inmates, either.”
A couple of hours passed in relative silence, with nothing but the robotic sound of Charlie’s glasses reading files. It was nearly five-thirty in the morning when Kallie let out an irritated huff and kicked over an empty file cabinet with her boot. A shiver raced from the top of my head and over my shoulders as I heard loud, chilling laughter echo from the cell block beside the office.
“Would you quiet down? You’re gonna piss them off,” Marcus hissed at her.
“Where’s big, bad Marcus, looking topunch out these motherfucking ghosts?” she snapped. “You sure lost your courage quick.”
“Kallie, we have to focus,” I told her. “We’ll never find what we’re looking for if you’re too busy throwing a tantrum.”
“There are thousands of records here. It could take us another night to come back and look through them all!” Kallie yelled.
“If that’s what we have to do, then so be it,” Charlie said. “We can’t let the Warden get farther ahead of us than he already is.”
I wasnotcoming back here another night. We were getting this information now, even if it took until morning.
What about this one?Oberi pawed at the bottom of a cabinet, trying to get at a file that was underneath it. Someone must’ve dropped it and kicked it underneath the cabinet by accident.
Kallie noticed Oberi whacking the cabinet, and she moved to pick it up. Oberi grabbed the dusty file, then plopped it in my lap before giving a cough.It’s pretty heavy.
I opened the folder and read the name on the first page aloud. “Dante Winselt. Race, merfolk. Sentenced August 18, 1869 for high treason. Execution, April 3, 1873.”
“August 1869 was the same timeframe that Amalie was arrested,” Kallie noted.
I eyed a picture clipped to the page, an aged, black and white photograph that was nearly two-hundred years old by this point. It showed the mugshot of a merman with a mess of wild curls and a scrawny frame.
He looked… absolutely terrified. I felt awful for this individual, though I wasn’t quite sure what he’d done.
“Is there more?” Charlie asked.
I scanned the next few paragraphs. “It says he was sentenced for stealing an item of importance from the Atlantean government with an accomplice, and fled with the object to an unknown location. He was apprehended after a long chase across the ocean. The accomplice isn’t listed.”
“That could be Amalie,” Marcus reasoned.
“Maybe. There’s nothing else that describes the crime,” I said as I began flipping through pages. “Just records of his time spent here at the prison, and… oh. Graphic details of his execution.”
“What happened to him?” Kallie rasped.
“It was a supernatural execution,” I said grimly. “Each race took a turn… the last person to torture him was a witch. They used telepathy magic to hover him in the air, before dropping him from four stories high. The first drop didn’t finish him off, so they had to do it again.”
“That’s barbaric,” Marcus croaked as his face turned green.
Kallie walked over to me. As she looked over my shoulder at the photograph, her eyes narrowed. Then they glossed over completely and took on a pearly sheen. Her body began to shake, like it had when she’d experienced the ancestral memory meditation. She quivered so hard that she slammed into one of the cabinets and knocked it over, though she didn’t wake from whatever vision was holding her now.
“What’s wrong?” Charlie demanded.
“Kallie’s gone into some sort of trance.” I was starting to panic, wondering if one of the ghosts around here had possessed her body.
“Kallie?” Marcus hastily crossed the room and shook her shoulders. “Come on, snap out of it!”
At his touch, her tremors ended, and she began to stir. As Kallie came out of the trance, she shook her head slowly.
