by Amy Plum
I don’t feel like arguing with a terrified thirteen-year-old. “Okay,” I agree.
George reaches out and squeezes my hand, looking at me gratefully with her Cleopatra eyes, and my heart does this little stuttering thing. I feel like face-palming. Sad, Fergus. You are a sad, sad human being. I turn away from her to walk down one of the paths, alone with my shame.
But I quickly realize I should have been paying more attention when I chose the direction I took. My path’s definitely the spookiest. Its uneven dirt is lined with wild, untrimmed trees extending long, fingerlike branches. The stones are mostly crumbling, besides a few newer ones scattered here and there.
I glance over at Ant and George. They’re holding hands, walking down a paved walkway leading to a more recent, well-tended part of the cemetery. I turn my attention back to the decrepit plots around me as I make my way down the path, scanning the area for anything out of the ordinary.
There’s not much to see, besides a ramshackle shed halfway down the hill. I make my way toward it, glancing down every few feet so I won’t stumble over the tree roots poking up through the earth like booby traps on either side of the trail.
The shed is made from the same big blocks of yellowing stone as the mausoleum at the top of the hill, but is small and square with a flat roof. I assume that it’s not the right shape for a sarcophagus, and when I peer through the broken window, I see I’m right. The tiny space is lined with tools: picks, shovels, and gardening utensils. An old-fashioned push lawn mower with a horizontal helix of metal blades stands rusting in one corner.
I hear a loud caw, and jump back from the window. A raven perches atop the roof, staring at me in that way that only the aviary spawn of Satan can. I hate ravens. They freak me out. But this one looks like he’s about to open his beak and speak, and we are in this weird nightmare, so I stare right back at him and wait. “Got anything for me?” I ask him finally. “Some kind of wisdom to impart? A message from the others?”
The bird cocks his head and looks at me like he thinks I’m insane.
“Who are you talking to?” comes a voice from behind me, and my heart leaps into my throat before I turn and see it’s Ant, peering at me suspiciously.
“No one,” I say, and jam my fists into my pockets.
“You were talking to the bird,” Ant says. “I saw you.” He looks nervously up at the raven, who eyes us before cawing loudly and flapping off to perch in the top of a tree.
“George thinks we’ve found something,” Ant continues, and begins walking off among the graves, stepping carefully over fallen branches, before looking back to make sure I’m following. We make our way toward the newer part of the cemetery, where George stands staring at something.
She points to a tombstone. “Weird, huh?” she says.
The stone is made up of three separate slabs placed one next to the other so tightly that there’s barely a crack in between. They’re each carved with different styles of writing but contain basically the same information. Name. Birth and death dates. And a couple of lines from a poem beneath.
“All three of them died in the last couple of years,” George remarks.
I do the math. “One was fourteen. The other two, sixteen.”
“Three teenage deaths on three different dates, with three different last names. So why are they all bunched here together?” George muses.
“They all have the same poem,” Ant points out, and begins reading.
“The traitor spread honey atop pretty lies.
Only the love of his victims he asked.
For deceiving the lamb is the wolf’s cherished prize.
And only in death is the true beast unmasked.”
“That sounds more like one of those cautionary fairy tales that were supposed to scare kids into being good,” I comment, bracing myself against a gust of wind that is so strong it almost blows me over. The cold filters through my vintage Night of the Living Dead T-shirt. Although I was dressed perfectly for the African dream, I am pitifully underdressed for a cold windy night in a graveyard. I feel oddly jealous of Ant’s weird but warm-looking woolen hat and gloves. I wish I had come better prepared. As if you could pack for nightmares.
George casts a sweeping glance across the graves around us. “Well, this is the only thing that looked out of place to us, if we’re not going to go too far from where we landed. Did you find any . . .”
Before she can finish her question, the ground below us thumps. As if someone pounded on a drum, just once, deep beneath our feet.
“What the . . .” George says. We stare at the ground. She looks up at me, white-faced. “What do you think that was?”
Although it’s cold, the palms of my hands are sweating like they’ve sprung a leak. “We’re in a nightmare,” I respond. “It could be anything.”
“It came from directly under us,” states Ant. “From the grave.”
We all stand still, listening until George gets down on the ground and presses her ear to the earth. “I hear something,” she says after a moment. “There’s something down there, scrabbling around.”
“Someone down there,” Ant corrects her. George raises herself up to her knees and the two look at each other, a look of mutual terror passing between them.
“Could it be them?” I ask. “Could it be Cata and . . .” I blank on the others’ names before remembering. “. . . Remi and Sinclair?”
“It could be the bodies of those three dead kids on the tombstones coming back to life,” George says, losing what was left of her cool and looking flat-out scared. “We could be in a zombie nightmare.”
And then the sound of a shriek comes from below us. A shriek that lengthens and deepens into a scream worse than any I’ve ever heard in a slasher film. A scream of pure, unadulterated horror.
“It’s Cata,” says George. “She’s buried alive. We’ve got to get her out.”
“How?” My thoughts flounder a minute before I remember the toolshed. “Shovels,” I say. “I saw picks and shovels in a shed just over there.”
I start running, and George is on her feet in an instant, following me. “Stay there,” I yell back to Ant.
“Yeah, right!” he yelps, and barrels after us.
In mere minutes, we’ve broken into the shed and are dashing back toward the triple grave, each toting a pick and shovel. I attempt to shovel into the hardened ground and quickly revert to the pick, axing it through the dry, dusty earth like I’m possessed by a whole mosh pit full of demons. The three of us are digging for all we’re worth, breaking the soil with the picks and then shoveling it away. Breaking and shoveling. In no time, sweat is pouring down my face, and the flying dirt coats my skin.
Voices begin to arise from the ground beneath us—male voices this time—and I can make out Remi’s African accent as well as Sinclair’s lower, rougher tone. “Help!” “Get us out!” they yell, and we are digging a mile a minute, standing hip-deep in earth, when I happen to glance up and see something floating across the tops of the graves toward us.
It’s the weird static creature that’s shown up in the last two nightmares. It flickers in and out, its multiple mouths grimacing, dead eyes bulging, as it jerks and flashes its way toward us.
“It’s the monster thing!” I yell, and George and Ant stop their digging and look in the direction I’m pointing.
Ant’s eyes grow wide. “It showed up right before the Wall appeared both times. What if . . .” He stops talking and begins digging even more feverishly than before.
“What if what?” I yell. The monster’s getting closer.
George looks up at me, a wild look in her eye, and answers for Ant—almost as if she’s reading his mind. “If the Wall comes, we’ll be able to escape into the Void. But we’ll be leaving the others here, buried underground!”
“Shit,” I say, and, tracking the monster’s approach in my peripheral vision, attack the earth with renewed frenzy. Two more strokes, and my pick hits something hard. “I’ve got it,” I say. Georg
e and Ant come over and help me.
A voice that sounds like beads of water sizzling on a hot iron hisses, “Reeeeeddddddd.”
I look up and the monster is standing-floating-standing on the ground beside us, its head leaning slowly to one side and eyes widening horrifically as it watches us. This time it’s shape-shifting from what looks like a squidlike alien thing with tentacles instead of arms to human and back again. It takes a step in Ant’s direction, grasping at him with a long, rubbery appendage.
Ant shrieks and swings his shovel at the thing, its blade passing smoothly through the static like a hot knife through butter. The fingers-tentacles-fingers keep reaching, inching forward as the thing opens its multiple mouths and moans, “Red.”
It brushes against a shovel lying at the edge of our pit, and the shovel sticks to its arm like a weak magnet, bobbing as it levitates slowly into the air. Ant is now up to his shoulders in our grave pit, and the shovel swings dangerously close to his head.
George screams, “Don’t even think about it!” and, lifting her pick in both hands, throws herself at the thing. I expect the pick to slice through thin air like Ant’s shovel did, and I dodge out of the way. Instead, the improvised weapon hits something and drags, tearing through what might be the monster’s side if it didn’t keep flashing in and out. The night air is pierced by a scream like nothing I’ve ever heard: as if God scraped giant fingernails down a galaxy-sized chalkboard.
George drops the pick and clasps her hands over her ears, as do Ant and I. The monster thing staggers backward, jerking grotesquely as it moves away from us.
Its out-of-control flailing transports me back to something I saw years ago. Mom was driving me home from a movie and our headlights caught something ahead on the road, violently bucking up and down. It looked like an invisible hand was repeatedly jerking it up a foot into the air and then smashing it back down onto the road. It flopped around like a fish on dry land, but going way too fast. And then I saw the cat’s long tail and bloody fur.
“Oh my God,” my mom shrieked, swerving to miss it. I whipped my head around to watch it flip spastically in our taillights.
“We have to go back and save it!” I yelled, my throat dry with horror.
“It’s already dead, Fergus.” My mom was holding her hand to her chest as if to stop her heart from falling out.
“Then why is it still moving?” I asked, a tear running down my eight-year-old cheek.
“It was killed by another car before we got there,” she explained. “Now it’s just the nerves reacting.”
The way the monster is wildly spasming reminds me of the dying cat.
I’m jerked back to reality by the realization that it was trying to kill us. I swallow my nausea and scoop my pick back off the ground to continue the fight, but the thing has receded into the distance, behind a group of trees.
“Dig!” I urge, and the others grab their tools from the ground.
George’s pick is dripping with blood. “Ugh,” she yells. She throws it back down, and scoops up her shovel from where the monster dropped it.
We’ve cleared away what seems like a huge area of earth, but the outline of the box beneath us just keeps on going. The thing is enormous. After a few more minutes of frenzied digging, we have cleared the edges of a massive coffin. Big enough for six people, I think, shuddering as I realize what this means. Surely they’re not down there with the dead teenagers. George meets my eyes, and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing.
All of a sudden, from the sky, comes a boom like a cannon shot. “Oh my God!” George yells, and dropping her shovel, she grabs the bloody pick and uses it to carve out the ground around the outline of the coffin. Apparently, the boom was heard underground as well, because renewed sounds of yelling and banging come from beneath our feet.
“No time to dig it all the way out,” I yell. “Let’s just try to pry the lid open far enough for them to escape!”
“We’re almost there!” George yells to them.
There’s silence from underground, and then . . . thump . . . like we had heard before, but much clearer now.
Ant’s eyes are popping out of his head in fear, but he stands still, pick in hand, watching the ground. “There!” he says, pointing to one side of our excavation. “The ground moved there when they banged on the lid.”
There is a thin seam in the dirt along one edge of the coffin. George and I scramble over to it, and wedge a shovel and pick beneath the lip of wood. We press all of our weight on our tools, trying to jimmy the lid open. There’s only enough room for the two of us. Ant crawls out of the pit, and stands to one side, holding his gloved hands to his cheeks and looking like he’s about to faint.
There is another boom from the heavens, and the black wall materializes a ways away, between us and the old section of the graveyard. “Faster!” Ant screeches. George and I strain at our tools, and the earth gives slightly, dirt falling away from a shiny mahogany edge as the lid comes up an inch. There is another thump from inside the coffin, and the lid eases open a few more inches, causing our tools to disengage and George and I to tumble against the earthen side of our pit.
Thump. With a jerk, the lid leaps up, leaving about a two-foot opening. A thin, dark-skinned arm reaches through it, tosses aside a knife with a broken blade that had been used to pry the lid open, and scrabbles at the side of the coffin like it’s trying to claw its way out. George and I lunge forward and force the lid open another few feet. A fog of toxic-smelling air releases around us, causing me to double over, gagging. George grabs Remi’s outstretched arm, and with what seems like superhuman strength, heaves him up out of the box. Ant reaches down from the edge of the pit to take Remi from George and pull him up to ground level.
George yells, “Run!” and points toward the black wall. The boys hesitate for a second, watching us guiltily. “Just go!” I yell. “Get a head start!” And they’re off, scrambling through the gravestones at top speed.
Cata lies in the coffin, eyes open but unmoving as Sinclair reaches up and grabs George’s outstretched hand and starts scrambling out of the box. Two corpses are wedged into either end of the coffin, upturned on their sides as if hiding their faces against the purple cushioned walls. Another corpse, face caved in and teeth bared in a skeleton’s grimace, lies next to Sinclair. As he scrambles to get out, he steps on it, crushing its ribs with a sickening crunch.
“Is she dead?” George asks, her voice rising in hysteria as she focuses on Cata’s unmoving form.
“No,” responds Sinclair. “I think she’s in shock.”
“Grab her hand,” I say. Sinclair and I crouch down and, taking Cata’s hands, pull her limp form up and out of the casket. Her head drops back and her mouth falls open.
“Cata! Wake up!” George slaps her face very gently, but with no effect.
“We have to get her out of here!” I say.
George and Sinclair scramble up to the grassy edge of the pit, and reach down to pull Cata up to ground level. By the time I climb out of the pit, she’s able to hold her head up.
As the third boom comes and the wind rises, I squat down next to her and stare into her blank eyes. “Cata!” I yell over the howling gusts. Her eyes roll to the side and then focus on me. “We have to run,” I urge. “The Wall’s about to close!”
I drape one of her arms around my neck and yell, “Sinclair, get the other side!” The two of us yank her off the ground, and to her feet.
Her lips move, and I lean in to hear what she says. “Can’t . . . walk. Legs won’t work.”
“How about your arms?” I ask.
She squeezes weakly with the arm that’s around my neck. “Okay, then hold on to us the best you can,” I say. “Sinclair! Four-handed seat!”
“What?” he asks, confused.
“We link our hands and she sits on our arms.”
Sinclair throws a worried glance at the Wall as we scoop Cata up in our arms. She manages to hang on loosely to our necks. “Let’s go!” I yell,
and we take off, George running ahead, steering us through the gravestones and around fallen branches.
We’re on the last stretch, running full speed at the Wall, when out of nowhere the monster reappears, jerking and flashing. As George runs past it, it reaches out and claws at her. She shrieks and bats it away, but it clings to her, stopping her from going through the Wall, its horrible, scraping scream barely audible over the roar of the wind.
I veer in her direction and, sensing what I’m doing, Sinclair works with me, running with Cata straight toward George’s flailing form. We hit her with all our force, diving hard into her, and sweep her off her feet and into the darkness.
CHAPTER 18
JAIME
TRIAL SUBJECT FOUR, SINCLAIR HARTFORD, SEVENTEEN, lives on the Upper East Side of New York City with his ob-gyn father and work-from-home mother. He’s a senior at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious private high schools, and his therapist is one even I’ve heard of: she’s always on CNN giving her opinion on mental-health-related news stories.
Sinclair’s summary is brief: chronic insomnia that affects his schoolwork and extracurricular activities (tennis, boating, lacrosse). There is a list of pharmaceuticals that he has tried, but all have had negative side effects. There is even one account of him taking Ambien, and then commandeering a waiting taxi and driving across town without knowing what he was doing.
He has been in therapy since a young age, but all files from the last five years are sealed by a court order. There’s a police file, but only the barest of details are listed: underage gambling, bookmaking, blank checks, and other things that don’t seem very exceptional for a superrich kid. The footnote, “Additional files accessible by warrant only through the NYPD,” mystifies me.
What could this privileged white boy have gotten mixed up in that would call for sealed records? Could whatever it is be a clue to the source of his insomnia? He doesn’t have narcolepsy or PTSD or depression like the other subjects I’ve read about. There isn’t a good explanation of what is stopping him from sleeping. Maybe the missing court file contains more information on his mental health.