Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  “What if something bad happens on the outside again, Tre? Because… of what we do?” That fear is there, huge and always with me now. Part of me questions whether I should just submit to Zoe’s plans just to keep the world safe. But the memory of the bodies I saw in my Color Crayon Brain hovers. If I fight this, maybe I can fight that vision from becoming a reality.

  “Come on,” he says, waiting, throwing his head toward the door. “We have to do this.”

  After a few breaths, I pull my superglued feet from the grass, take a deep breath, and dig up any ounce of leftover bravery I have inside. I follow him back inside.

  47

  Tre lies on the stone floor like I did, peeking underneath the same door to the séance room. Silence replaces the thumping chanting noises. Darkness supplants the light from beneath the door.

  “I don’t see anything,” he says, gazing up at me.

  My leg bounces nervously. “Let me look,” I whisper, swapping places with him on the cold floor. The damp, musty air fills my nose down here, and I shut one eye to peer into the sliver of a crack. I see no redheaded witch. Nothing but darkness. An avalanche of relief, disappointment, and anger tumbles around me. I should have helped that girl.

  “They must be gone,” I whisper. Perhaps I only imagined it. Maybe, though, someone is waiting around the corner for us. This fear requires every ounce of resolve for me not to bust up the stairs and out the back door again.

  My fingers flutter to my neck, tracing the ankh cross.

  “I just wish I had a way to get into those rooms,” Tre mutters. “We could try using another dining room chair or maybe figure out a way to make an explosion.”

  “We could burn the house down,” I whisper, absently. It’s appealing, but it doesn’t mean we’ll figure out a way out of here.

  “Hey!” My fingers hold up the necklace, shaped sort of like a skeleton key. “I met this lady Lodima twice in the forest, and she told me this was her good luck necklace, a symbol of awareness that allows you to see through deception. When we were out in the canyon together, I woke up and her necklace was in my bag.”

  Tre watches me, confused, while I take it off my neck.

  “It’s called an ankh cross,” I explain. “The ancient Egyptians believed in Hathor, goddess of death and life, and believed she carried it and gave life with it.”

  “Okay…”

  I hand it to him. He studies it and talks without looking at me. “You know what? My mom actually had a necklace like this, too.” He looks at me in the dark, but I can’t see his expression.

  I nod, encouraging him. It could be that this was just a popular style of necklace and I’m reading more into it than necessary. But delirious optimism lights inside me.

  “Maybe it’s a key,” I say, hopeful. “To this room, or a way out. A way for us to get our lives back.”

  “Yeah,” he says, turning it over in his fingers. “Or maybe it’s a key to this whole rebirthing thing.” He hands it back to me.

  The cynicism makes my stomach sour again. I push him aside and feel in the dark for a keyhole in the door. I decide I like my theory better than his.

  “I say it’s a way out.” I run my hand over the entire door, searching for a hole in the grooves, from top to bottom. There’s no keyhole. I shake my head.

  “Let’s check the other doors,” he says.

  We remain silent, using hand signals to communicate. One of us tries the door while the other stands watch. Both jobs—standing watch and trying to find a keyhole—make my heart pound so hard I am sure it will shake the roof of this entire house.

  But after eight doors, we find no keyhole. Then, around a dark corner, down three steps, we try one last door. My hands cover virtually every inch of it—and a couple feet up from the floor, my fingers dip into something. Squatting down, I find a tiny hole the size of my pinky finger. I gasp.

  Licking my lips and fumbling the cross necklace in my fingers, I close my eyes in a silent prayer that somehow this door will magically open up to the highway near home. We’d race through a green field to the road. I’d look back and the door to Trinity would be gone, shut on this whole nightmare. We’d get a ride from some friendly girl in a warm car. I’d meet up with Maddie and Jared and Gram and I’d open up to them again. We’d start our lives again away from this place. Maybe, if Tre is not the asshole that he seemed to be forty-five minutes ago with Lilly, we’d be together and blissful like we were at the lake. We’d be together and happy and in love. It would be that simple.

  The long side of the cross slips into the hole. It fits. A quick turn, and a little click.

  I crane my head up to see Tre. “Oh my God, it worked,” I whisper. It really is a key.

  I stand up, feeling slightly smug and handing the necklace mindlessly to Tre as I push on the door. He slips it into the front pocket of his jeans.

  I inhale, expecting my vision to become a reality, willing it to be real. I push the door in. As it creaks open, I wait with excitement to see what’s inside. My face falls. That wild vision of opening a door to the normal world isn’t happening. Instead, it opens to a dark, dank room much like the one where that girl was being sacrificed.

  Tre strides into the dim room and across the dirt floor without hesitation.

  “It’s cold in here,” I say, shivering, hugging my body with my arms and shuffling slowly behind him.

  He moves to the far corner of the room, ahead of me, and over to a small wooden shelf filled with rows of glass containers. I follow.

  Inside one container is some sort of white powder. Inside the others, a number of various crumbled and dried green and red weeds and herbs. One jar contains a dozen smooth, flat black stones stacked up neatly on top of one another.

  “What is this stuff?” I ask, pointing to the powder.

  “No clue.” Tre shrugs.

  “I wonder if they’ve been drugging us with the food,” I say, panicked at the idea of poisonous chocolate cake, poisonous strawberry drinks.

  “Could be,” he says. “It feels like Zoe has some sort of chemical on her, like a perfume that can act like a drug when you’re near her. I know that a lot of perfumes contain chemicals with narcotic properties, you know like benzaldehyde.”

  It makes sense—it would explain why I can’t focus when I’m near her.

  I explore the rest of the room, running my fingers over lines of stone bowls. A large clay vase sits on the floor holding half a dozen long metal sticks that extend several feet high—like oversized skewers you’d see at a barbeque. Some sort of black fabric hanging from clips. Vials and vials filled with clear liquids. A long black tray lined with circular pieces of metal the size of coins. Like the pyramid coin.

  I walk over to examine the rough stacked-stone walls. They look like they’ve been here forever. Maybe I’ll find another door or a secret latch. Maybe my fantasy of this room leading to a highway home is still a possibility.

  After a few minutes of running my fingers over the walls, looking for a loose stone or a clue, I find nothing.

  A sudden thud in the room makes my heart freefall into my stomach. I spin around, expecting the red witch behind me.

  It’s only Tre. He dropped a heavy book onto a wooden table.

  “Shhhh!” I move to the table, which has a pile of books that look so old they could crumble with a single touch. He opens one of the books and I peer over his shoulder. The page shows little squiggly lines, strange letters, drawings, and symbols. Tiny stick figures, birds, animals.

  “Those are Egyptian writings,” I say. The thought occurs to me that maybe Mom wrote something about that in her red Crazy Woman Notebook. I can’t believe I carted it around with me to school and to this forest but didn’t even really take the time to look in it. Really look in it.

  “You know what?” he says with a faraway stare. “I saw a symbol carved into the cliff when I was out there trying to climb out this hellhole. I don’t see the symbol in here… but it was similar to these. I bet I could show
you. Maybe there are others. Maybe they’re important.”

  “My mom was all into all this earth energy stuff, and I have a notebook of stuff she kept… There were Egyptian symbols all over the cover, including a pryamid like the one on our coin. I haven’t really looked at it, but maybe that might help us, you know, translate.”

  “You just happened to bring notebooks with Trinity pyramids to this place?” he asks, raising his brows in surprise.

  I don’t tell him that I keep random notebooks of weird stuff, too. And that I happen to carry all that stuff around with me to school and everywhere I go. Just because. Just because I am me.

  I shrug. “Just a warning. She was a freak. Like me.”

  As soon as the words escape my mouth, it dawns on me that perhaps I am just like my mother. I bite my lip.

  Tre smiles. “I like freaks.” He runs his finger slowly down my back. He gets inside my heart again. His touch lights up my whole body, and we’re back. I’m his. We mean something, he and I.

  “It’s in my backpack,” I say. “I’ll grab it, and we’ll go out there and see if those symbols lead us to something important.”

  Trinity will punish people for what we do. But if we give in to this place, we will just be pawns doing Trinity’s bidding, and that’s no better.

  48

  We drag our fingertips along the textured limestone cliff wall, bumping over the sharp indents and ridges. Tre walks ahead of me, slowly. Tree branches break under his feet, and his hand sweeps over the rock wall.

  “It’s somewhere along here,” he says. “I found it on my second day out here.”

  After hiking all the way up to the cliff wall, we’ve scavenged the area, looking for a good forty-five minutes, climbing over rocks, scouring the wall, ducking under branches. A breeze kicks in, the air becomes cooler, and the light dims as a series of ominous thunderclouds move swiftly across the sky.

  Finally, Tre calls to me, “Here it is!”

  I run to find him leaning over a large boulder pushed up against the cliff wall. His hands frame an engraving on the limestone rock. It’s a carving of a small bird, its wings spread upward to the sky. Detailed. Indented. Like a deep stamp. There’s a small circular hole on top of the carving the size of a quarter. I stick my finger inside up to my first knuckle, feeling the jagged edges of the wall.

  “It looks like the stuff we saw in the basement,” he says, running his fingers over it.

  I pull out Mom’s red notebook from my backpack, careful to keep my Missing Persons journal tucked deep inside.

  I find a similar drawing sketched in Mom’s notebook. “It’s a phoenix,” I say. “See? Its wings point upwards, almost forming a circle. In Greek mythology, the bird would set itself on fire instead of laying eggs in a nest. And then it would emerge from its own ashes, reborn. Living forever. Rebirth. Just like Zoe tells us.”

  Eerie.

  Maybe it’s some sort of hidden lock. I press on the phoenix. Nothing happens. I look up. The cliff extends some hundred feet tall—our own Berlin Wall.

  “Why do you think it’s out here?” he asks.

  “Maybe it’s part of some sort of map?” I suggest.

  “Or an exit sign?” he says. “We should look around for other marks. Maybe there are more.” Tre climbs over more rocks and ducks under trees to examine every surface.

  My ankle is killing me, and I’m back to my zombie gait again as I try to simultaneously walk and look at the notebook, which is scrawled with messy handwriting and drawings of symbols and maps. This is the journal of a crazy woman.

  There are several pages of Egyptian symbols, but when I move to follow him, the notebook bounces in my hands and the words jump around on the page. I stop and take a closer look at the picture of the phoenix on the page and see a light purple dot above it. I stare at it for a few seconds, wondering what it means.

  I gaze up at the phoenix on the cliff and the circular hole above it. Maybe something purple goes inside it, like a key. I flip through the rest of the six drawings of symbols. Above each one, there’s a different-colored dot. One light yellow. Another that’s light pink. Mom had circled the drawing of an ankh cross and colored the dot above it amber brown. She sloppily scrawled the word agate.

  My entire body is wound with wire, ready to snap. “Agate!” I whisper.

  Tre half listens to me as he stands with hands on hips, lines creasing his forehead. Here’s a guy who could smash the Berlin Wall and who is so smart he could probably solve a Rubik’s Cube in a matter of minutes. But he’s dumbfounded by this stupid Egyptian puzzle.

  “Tre!” My voice rises with excitement. I jump up but land on my bad ankle, and I gasp from the sharp stabbing pain. “You know how my mom was all into crystals? She told me that agate is a crystal that means healing and protection. She drew pictures of a bunch of Egyptian symbols in her notebook with small colored circles over them. I bet they’re colors of crystals. That hole over the top of the phoenix? It’s empty. We’re supposed to put the crystals into the cliff wall over these symbols. I just know it. And I bet the symbol of the ankh cross is our way out. She circled it.”

  Of course, this is all me wanting a path, wanting a clue, deciding that Mom’s Crazy Woman Notebook actually means something. But Tre bites.

  He moves quickly back to me, eager, and leans in to gaze at the notebook. “Maybe…” he whispers.

  “The rocks. We have to get that tin of crystals back at the house,” I say, breathless. We will be together. We will get out. We will knock down this wall. I feel it in my bones. My grin engulfs my face, and Tre looks back at me, mirroring my enthusiasm.

  As if answering us with a resounding fat chance, a bang of thunder explodes in the air, so loud it rattles inside my rib cage. Then light flashes so bright, it’s as if the sun itself landed in this canyon.

  “That was close!” Tre’s voice is a bundle of nerves. I jump and cover my head, leaning into him. The clouds swarm the sky like ominous ghosts. The storm moved in so quickly.

  “Too close,” I whisper. I duck my head down, as if that position is somehow going to keep me from being struck by a billion volts of electricity.

  A faucet opens up from the sky, dumping a month’s worth of rain on us, pounding furiously and forming a series of brown rivers that rush down the hillside. We run for shelter beneath an outcropping on the cliff wall. I tuck the notebook beneath my shirt to keep it dry.

  Another bang. The entire sky breaks up above us, and a long, jagged white line flares in the gray sky. The hairs on my arms stand on end. I reach up and cover my head, scrunching my chin to my chest. The sky above a nearby canopy of trees looms in a swirl of gray and black silky blankets.

  We finally reach cover, but I still clutch the notebook to my chest, feeling an intense need to protect it. “We should really read this,” I say. Immediately, I want to shove the words back into my throat. I’m breaking and entering inside Mom’s head—and inviting someone with me to boot.

  But curiosity gets the best of me. I need to read this. And I need Tre to do it with me. I open the red cover, feeling Tre’s warm breath on my neck as he reads over my shoulder.

  The first few lined pages contain the detailed drawings of the Egyptian symbols with the various colored dots. We talk about where the other symbols might be located on the cliffs, if at all. We make a plan to look after the lightning lets up. Then we read on. It’s hard to make out the sloppily scrawled words. She obviously wrote this for herself.

  Mom listed what looks to be titles of books. Vanishing, Crystal Mystics, Earth Mysteries. Egyptian Heka, The Haunted, and The Hitchhiker Souls of the Dead.

  On the following pages, Mom’s writing contends Egyptian artifacts indicated they were visited by beings from the sky. That the sky apparently opened up and bright lights came down to them to bring them technology and wisdom. The Mayans saw this. The Incas. Greeks. Aztecs. They communicated and influenced and guided ancient cultures, leading to the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge.

 
; “Light from the sky. This is nuts,” I say, shaking my head. We could indeed be reading the notebook of a crazy woman, just like everyone in Leadville always thought. Maybe they were right.

  I start to close the notebook, but Tre places his hand on mine, stopping me. Silently, he turns the next page. At the top, the words Black Vortexes, underlined. Beneath them, scrawled notes about negative-energy vortexes that cause strange paranormal activities: gravity defiance, bent light, twisting plants. They are apparently associated with ley lines in places like Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and Egypt’s Great Pyramids.

  Carefully hand-drawn maps on the page accompany lines and lines of scrawled numbers and geometric diagrams. Some maps look like they have little squiggles and Egyptian symbols. Beneath them, the notebook lists even more locations: Dragon’s Triangle off Japan, the Bermuda Triangle, Lourdes in France, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and Hawaii’s Hamakulia Volcano.

  I inhale and forget to exhale. That’s the Hawaiian volcano where Laurie Parker went missing. And another article I clipped said Ben Alackness disappeared backpacking in New Mexico. My heart lurches.

  There’s no easy way to say, Hey Tre, I know the names of people who disappeared in those places.

  How?

  Oh, my hobby is to cut out pictures of missing people. And you?

  The notebook explains how ships have vanished near Antarctica. Electromagnetic instruments failed to function, compasses spun, and the sky filled with a luminous yellow haze. Mom scribbled something about an Inuit village that disappeared in Lake Anjikuni in the 1930s.

  “I’ve read theories about these places. You know, magnetic fields. Electronic fog. Space-time warps. Entry to freaky third dimensions,” Tre says.

  “Black vortexes,” I say slowly, processing all of this.

  I scan the page. There it is. Trinity Forest. Underlined twice.