The Mary Shelley Club

by Goldy Moldavsky

  Now I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, my palm slick with sweat as it slid down the banister. It was just one flight but the stairs were steep and I worried about tripping. My head vibrated with the sound of my breathing, coming fast, and the guilt of what I’d just done.

  This game used to be candy. A sugary, addictive treat. Now there was only the sour aftertaste and the seeping knowledge of just how bad for you it was. The excitement that’d eclipsed everything before was eroding, eaten away by the harsh truth of what we were doing. It was a game of terror, but all we were doing was terrorizing people.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs I looked back, expecting Saundra to be right behind me, demanding answers. She wasn’t there, but somebody else was. Standing on the second-floor landing was one of my own, a monster in a mask.

  “It’s over!” I shouted. My voice was hot and half muted by the rubber over my face. I didn’t sound like myself, and the longer I wore the mask, the more the guilt and disgust ate away at me. “She screamed!”

  I tried to make out which of us it was, but we were all in the same uniform—the black hoodie, white mask. From this strange angle, staring up at them, the person looked both dwarfed and menacingly large. They were little more than a dim shadow, with only the mask truly noticeable, its whiteness a ghostly beacon in the darkness. Whoever it was stood still for a moment. A statue. Like they were listening, considering what I’d just said.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Let’s go!”

  They finally moved, but instead of following me down, they turned into the hallway and out of my view.

  There was no time for this. I had to find the rendezvous and a safe place to pull off my mask. I briskly walked down a hallway but then a closet door swung open, nearly crashing into me. A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed mine, pulling me in.

  “What the hell?” I shouted. The door closed behind us, squeezing us into the tight space. I was crammed between swinging coats, some thick enough to be smothered by. My first reflex was to swing but my hand was caught midway, followed by a “Shh.”

  “Freddie?” The only light in the closet came from the crack in the doorframe. Not enough to illuminate him, but I knew instantly that it was him by his scent.

  “What are you—” I stopped to jerk my mask off my head. “What are you doing?”

  Outside the door there was the sound of someone running past. “Anyone could’ve seen you,” Freddie whispered.

  I yanked off the hoodie, my elbows knocking into Freddie and the coats. A few weeks ago I might’ve been thrilled to be in a closet with Freddie, shedding layers of clothes. So much had changed.

  The hoodie was off, but it wasn’t enough. I could feel the familiar dread crawling up my skin like fire ants, my arms feeling weak and heavy, and all I could think to do was to reach out. My fingers felt for Freddie, searching for purchase, winding into his sweatshirt.

  “She knew it was me,” I muttered, my voice hitching with panic. “She knew it was me under the mask, she’s going to figure it all out—the Mary Shelley Club, she already thinks I’m keeping secrets—”

  Freddie pulled me into him, wrapping his arms around me quickly.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s over. I heard her scream.”

  “She’s going to hate me.”

  “She’ll be confused like everyone else. I’ll give you an alibi, okay? You can tell her you were in a closet with me, making out all night.”

  It was hard to tell if it was meant as a joke, considering that in another timeline, we might have been doing exactly that. It put the spotlight on the awkward way we’d left things, and how we’d never actually sat down to talk everything through. Maybe this was the universe sending me a sign that we were meant to hash things out.

  Freddie seemed to think so.

  “Do you still think it was me?” he said. “What Bram accused me of, hurting Lux. You still believe that?”

  I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t want to.

  “Compromising the club would be the last thing I would ever want to do. Not only because I love the club, but because you know what would happen if we got caught. Bram, Thayer, Felicity—they’d be okay. But you and me? We don’t have a safety net. We don’t have family lawyers to bail us out of any binds. We can’t mess up.”

  I nodded fervently.

  “If you don’t want to be with me, that’s fine,” Freddie said. “But I can’t stand back and let Bram convince you that I’m some monster. He’s the one who made us wear masks tonight. He chose Saundra to get back at you. He’s the one who’s acting like a lunatic, Rachel.”

  It was dark but I could feel his face close to mine, his warm breath. He wanted nothing more than for me to trust him. The truth was, I wanted that, too.

  “Freddie, I—”

  We jumped at the sound of a crash. It was so loud I could feel it in my bones—loud like the whole cabin was coming down.

  Freddie and I didn’t need to say anything. The intensity of our conversation evaporated instantly, replaced by something graver. He reached for the doorknob first and we both ran out of the closet.

  There was a group of people huddled in the grand foyer, looking down at something. I thought it was strange that they were looking down because all I saw was the gaping hole up above. The skylight was gone, with nothing left but shards of glass still dangling from the frame.

  “There was somebody up there!” a boy cried. “I saw someone up there!”

  But the rest of the crowd was strangely quiet. A tense quiet, like people gathered around a torched house or a car wreck. I broke through the crowd until I could see what they were looking at.

  I recognized her hair first before I saw her face. She lay in the middle of the floor, too still. Her eyes stared up at me. I couldn’t remember what I said or sobbed in those moments. Just that my eyes instantly flooded, while Saundra’s stayed lifeless.

  40

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my voice. It was dazed and hoarse, and I didn’t know if it was from crying or screaming or both.

  I also didn’t know how I’d gotten to the rendezvous point, behind the empty general store, standing with the Mary Shelley Club again. We were not the stoic, sober ghosts from earlier in the night. We were disheveled and rambling. This time everything was completely fucked.

  The last thing I remembered seeing was Saundra’s face, frozen in fear. It was the last thing, the first thing, the only thing I could think of.

  Everything else fused together: the dark woods, the endless snow, the medley of rushed voices. Felicity was loud—jarringly, unexpectedly loud, asking where we all were when it happened.

  There was Thayer. His face was blank but wet with tears.

  Bram was the last to join us. He emerged from the dark edges of the woods, silent and stumbling like some kind of Frankenstein.

  Somebody was letting out ragged sobs and it took me a moment to realize it was me. “Can somebody please tell me what happened?” I asked again.

  Freddie’s hands were ice-cold when he cupped my face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I stared back at him, not understanding the question, but he kept asking it. The words eventually rearranged from “Are you okay?” to “You are okay.” Over and over again until I could finally breathe.

  “We need a plan,” Felicity said. “The cops are going to come and they’re going to be asking questions.”

  “That’s what you’re focusing on now?” I nearly screamed.

  “Rachel’s right. We need to slow down. We still don’t know what happened,” Freddie said.

  Something caught my eye, a flash of dark red. The stuff was smeared on Bram’s fingers. Some of it on his cheek, his hair. The sight of it made my mind short-circuit, go back to the spot on the floor where Saundra lay, surrounded by the pool of blood that had been seeping out of her.

  “Whose blood is that?” I asked. But nobody heard me.

  Bram caught me
looking, though. He wiped his hand on his hip and the red disappeared just like that, soaked up by the black material.

  “We don’t say anything,” Felicity said, pulling me back into the moment. She was pacing. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to us or to herself. A part of me wanted to laugh. This was what the club was really about. Not fun movie watching, not debates about horror.

  “We don’t say anything,” I said, mimicking her, my words spilling over clumsily.

  “She’s in shock,” Freddie was saying. “I think she’s in shock.”

  “Forget about her. We need to get our stories straight!” Felicity said. “We can’t expose the club.”

  The club. Really? I leaned my head back and this time I let a laugh ring out. They stared, but I didn’t care. I laughed so much that my teeth chattered. I laughed so much I shivered. And as they stared at me, watching me shake, I said, “Saundra is dead.”

  Everyone stopped. Felicity stopped talking and Bram stopped pacing and Thayer stopped crying and Freddie stopped looking at me like I was a fragile thing. I wasn’t sure why that had commanded their attention. All of us had known she was gone. I only said it because nobody else had yet. And it felt like something that needed to be said. Maybe if I said it more it would sink in. Feel real. Because it didn’t yet. “She died.”

  “Is this Captain Obvious story hour?” Felicity asked.

  “Shut it, Felicity,” came Bram’s voice, dark and thundering.

  Saying the words out loud didn’t make me stop, though. It actually felt like everything in me started moving again. My heart started pumping so hard I could feel it down to my toes. The numbness all around me washed away. There was a scream inside me and it filled my head, so loud that it shook me.

  “Saundra jumped through the skylight,” Felicity said. “She killed herself.”

  I was on my feet in an instant, rushing toward Felicity. “She didn’t kill herself!” I yelled in her face. Felicity was only an inch away from me, but I couldn’t see her clearly through my tears. “She wouldn’t do that!”

  Saundra had fallen.

  Or she’d been pushed.

  And as soon as I thought that, I felt in my bones that it was true. There was that masked figure on the landing. The memory came fast and burning, like taking a bitter shot of straight alcohol. I’d seen someone at the top of the stairs right before I went into the closet with Freddie. I remembered how the person had just stood there when I tried to talk to them. How uneasy I’d felt. How every hair on my body had stood up like a warning flag.

  “We were running around with masks on trying to scare her,” I said. Whoever pushed Saundra had been wearing a mask too, which meant we were responsible. I was responsible. That burning feeling from before turned into a sticky roiling in the pit of my stomach. I was nauseous suddenly. Sick.

  “Yeah, if anyone asks, how about we don’t fucking say that,” Felicity said.

  “We all tossed our masks, right?” Freddie asked.

  There were grumbles and nods. Thayer, who’d been holding his mask in a white-knuckled fist this whole time seemed to suddenly realize it. He hurled it into the woods like it was a live grenade.

  “Bram, give me your lighter,” Felicity said. She kicked at the ground where she stood, spattering snow and clumps of dead grass like she was a dog trying to bury a bone. She dropped her mask into the newly made hole. Bram fished a gold Zippo out of his pocket and passed it to Felicity, but he was still holding his own mask. He examined it, and from three yards away I did, too. There was blood on it, standing out against the monster’s white face. Bram shoved the mask into the front pocket of his hoodie. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. There were too many things being hidden away, too many secrets.

  “We have to tell someone what we did.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Thayer said. He said it over and over again, trying to make it more true.

  “Someone died. Saundra died,” I said. “We have to tell them what we were doing.”

  I could hear sirens in the background, getting closer, and it was all too obvious who I meant by “them.”

  “Was I not clear before, Rachel?” Felicity said. She was in my face suddenly, pointing a finger at me like it was a knife. “You want to confess to a crime that doesn’t even exist? You’ll be the only one, because none of us will back you on that. You go against the club, and we go against you.”

  “Are you seriously threatening her right now?” Freddie said.

  “Guys,” Thayer cried.

  But neither of them contradicted Felicity. Not Thayer, and not Freddie.

  I looked at Bram. Just the sight of him was enough to strike up rage in me, pounding in my head. It tried to burst through me, break through my skin with its ugly talons and be unleashed. It was his fault that this had happened. He was the one who’d made us put on the masks.

  I imagined his lifeless body on the floor instead of Saundra’s. My pounding head was filled with the dark fantasy that he’d been killed instead of her.

  “Enough.” Felicity flicked Bram’s lighter open and a flame sparked to life. She dumped it in the hole she’d kicked into the ground. It landed on her mask and a small fire roared to life. The smell of burning rubber was instant. I looked down at the mask, the hideous, shriveled white face staring up. But soon the whole thing was ablaze, curling and bubbling.

  The sirens were so close now it was like they were inside my head. The cold scratched at my cheeks, tickling them raw. I was dizzy. I felt so utterly powerless. Who knew the game would end up like this? I looked around to see if anyone else was feeling this awful, too. But all I saw were monsters.

  I bent over and vomited into the snow.

  41

  I WAS BACK in my old house, in the same kitchen, in the same nightmare. He was there. We thrashed on the floor but no matter how hard I fought, we always ended up in the same position: with me on my back and the masked figure on top of me, his knees pinning me in place, one hand busy restraining my arms, the other pointing the knife at me.

  The dream had always been the same but this time was different. This time, I stopped struggling. And when his knife came down, I let it pierce my chest. He put his whole weight into it, leaned down to meet me, his rubber face only inches from mine. But no matter how deep the knife went, I felt nothing. He was the one letting out the guttural moans. Blood seeped first from between his waxy white lips, then poured freely from his eyes, dripping onto my face.

  I woke up with my sheets tangled around my legs and my face wet. When I brought my hands to my cheeks, I was sure they’d come away red. But it was only sweat. Or tears.

  I took a deep breath, but it caught in my throat when I looked at the foot of my bed. Standing there was Matthew Marshall. And next to him was Saundra.

  The two stood side by side, staring at me like the world’s most screwed-up wedding cake topper. The only movement came from the blood that oozed out of them, trickling at first, then in waterfalls.

  “Scream,” Saundra said.

  She placed one knee on the bed and then the other, moving toward me while dripping blood on my blanket. She crawled until she reached me, her eyes bugging out of her face, her smile wide, teeth stained red.

  “Just … SCREAM.”

  So I did.

  I screamed so loud my mother came into the room to stop me. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me. Or maybe I shook of my own accord. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if I had been dreaming or if they were ghosts or if I’d died and gone to hell. I wasn’t sure of anything except that when I looked toward the foot of my bed, Matthew and Saundra were gone.

  “It’s my fault,” I said, my words waterlogged with tears and snot. My mother searched my face, concern and confusion coloring hers.

  I needed to be clearer. She needed to understand. “It’s my fault they’re dead!”

  “Oh, honey, no.”

  “Yes, it is. First Matthew, now Saundra. Saundra died because of me. Saundra died—”
>
  Mom’s tight embrace cut me off in midsentence. She shushed me and pushed my hair back and whispered words of comfort in my ear.

  But she didn’t understand.

  * * *

  In a cruel twist of fate, Saundra got what she’d always wanted: She was the hottest topic of conversation at school. A few people speculated that she was high (because why else would she be up on the roof?) and that she must’ve tripped and fallen. Some suggested that she had flung herself through the skylight in some, I don’t know, final act of dramatic anguish. But most people believed something else. That there was a person in a white rubber mask on that roof with her. That they pushed her.

  There were a lot of people in masks that night. Everybody had seen them. But some people swore that when Saundra landed in the middle of the grand foyer, they’d looked up and seen a ghostly, unmoving face staring down at them.

  I believed all and none of it, picturing every possible way Saundra could’ve fallen until I couldn’t think of anything else. I was physically at school, but walked the halls like something out of a Romero movie, my zombie shuffle on point without even trying.

  We were called into an assembly to discuss what had happened to Saundra. It wouldn’t be the only one. Before he took the stage, AssHead pulled me aside and said there would be another assembly for Saundra, a proper memorial, and that if I wanted to speak at it I should.

  “I know how close you two were,” he said, frowning.

  I must’ve vaguely nodded because AssHead answered with “Great,” and then took to the stage to talk about Manchester losing one of its “brightest lights” in a tragic accident.

  My phone buzzed in the front pocket of my bag and I bent down to take it out. Another text from Freddie, asking how I was doing and if I wanted to talk. It was the latest in a string of texts he’d sent me, all of which I’d left unanswered. I couldn’t deal with him or anyone else in the club. Any last remnants of the Mary Shelley Club’s fun and playfulness had died with Saundra. If it’d ever really been fun or playful to begin with.