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.
Part Eight
Mark
Chapter 25
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 the 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.
Part Nine
David
Chapter 26
MY 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.”
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.”
Chapter 27
SWEAT 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.”
Chapter 28
“THIS 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.”
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