“Yes, you do!” Laney insists. “For that project we’re working on together. For Solomon’s class. He emailed our assignments.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m in the middle of tenth level. Can this wait?”
Laney bolts over, shoving Jake aside to completely block the screen. Marcus moans, and I flip my controller to the ground. “What the heck, Shanahan? You screwed up our capture.”
I finally notice her bug-eyed glare. “We’re in the same group, remember?” She picks up the controller and whips it in my direction. “There are seven assignments. Seven. Remember? Now get in there and print your email, you dumbash.”
Oh, right … something’s happened. I hand my controller to Jake and jump up to follow her into the computer room.
Behind me, Marcus mumbles, “Remind me never to take a class with Senile Solomon.”
Laney checks the hall before closing the door. She nudges me toward a computer. “I was googling articles on the Society of Seven tonight. Nothing came up except some lame ’80s pop band, which I guess makes sense since it’s a secret society.”
“Is that it? I’d like to finish this game before lights-out.”
She eyes me with disdain. “No, that’s not ‘it.’ I got an email from the Sevens. See if you got one too.”
A cold current zips down my spine. She pulls a chair out for me and watches out the door as I log in.
A single message appears:
To: [email protected]
From: Number 7
Dear Pledge:
You will be given seven tests to prove your worth and loyalty prior to your initiation into the Society of Seven.
Commit the following poem to memory. Your first test depends on it.
When darkness fills you up with fright,
Tread straight, straight, straight into the night.
Left, right, left—the soldier’s pace—
Until it leads right to a place
Where everything you thought you knew,
Will turn around. And you will, too.
Left to sort what’s wrong from right,
And why you’re going to have to fight,
to take what’s left
and make it right.
My fingers twitch on the keyboard as my heart pounds. It takes a minute to unscramble my thoughts.
Laney moves from her post and reads the email over my shoulder. “Yep, that’s the same one I got.” She heads back to the door and says, “Print the poem and then delete the email.”
“So you think this is real?”
“Talan, how can you even question it at this point? Yes, it’s real, and maybe once in your life you can be serious and step up. I know you’re smart, but sometimes you really don’t act like it.”
I’d have no problem stepping up if I knew what I was stepping up to.
I’m pulling my copy from the printer when Laney turns suddenly, waving her arms like a traffic cop. “Mom’s coming.” She rushes to a desk at the opposite end of the room and fakes zipping her backpack closed.
Mom calls through the door, “Time for bed.”
I bury the paper deep in my pocket like I’m hiding heroin. It makes me think of my mother.
Nine
The next morning, I corner Laney by her locker before school. “Did you memorize the poem?”
She enters her combination. “Yep. Did you?”
“Yeah, but I’m still not sure about this, Laney. We do have friends who know both our email addresses.”
She cuts me off with a loud squeak and slams her locker closed again. “Talan, there’s a black envelope inside my locker.”
My pulse racing, I scan the crowded hallway. “No one’s looking. Open it.”
“Here?”
“No. In the women’s bathroom. I’ll follow you inside and we can read it together in a stall. I’m sure no one will notice us there.” I roll my eyes. “Yes, here. I’ll be your lookout. Just open it.”
With her hands inside her locker, she slides a handwritten note out of the envelope. “If this is a prank, it’s a great one. How’d they get this in here? The slots are too narrow for it to fit through.”
I shrug and check the hall for prying eyes. “What’s it say?”
She reads softly:
First Test-Courage:
“Courage is found in unlikely places.”-J.R.R. Tolkien
Time: This Evening, 7:00 P.M.
Place: Rear Elevator, First Floor, Jefferson Library.
1. Close with 2
2. Seven times the LL
3. Seven times the Help
She stares at it, then stuffs the paper inside her math book. “What the heck does that even mean?” The hallway’s getting busier, so she leans close and whispers, “You should check if you got one. Maybe yours has different clues.”
Her lips graze my cheek, and I get the strangest rush. Out of nowhere, I imagine being kissed by those lips. And liking it.
“O-okay,” I mutter. “You wait here.”
My head is still buzzing as I walk down to my locker. Inside, I find my own black envelope with the exact message as hers. I nod at her and mouth same.
Suddenly, Kollin creeps up behind her and covers her eyes. She screams, and everyone turns and looks. Nice timing, idiot.
Standing side by side, Laney and Kollin look like two mannequin models of preppy perfection. He smiles down at her, and I almost forget the envelope in my hand. I slide it into my pocket.
They walk past me on their way to class. “Listen,” Kollin is saying, “do you want to go into town this weekend? Maybe do the movie thing again?”
Now the buzz feels more like a hangover. Laney loves movies. I wouldn’t mind going sometime, but Singer School is pretty strict about leaving campus. You have to have straight A’s for two consecutive semesters, with perfect behavior and full privileges, in order to go into town. That cuts out about 99 percent of the student body, including me.
Laney gnaws on her fingernail. “Maybe.” She glances back as she passes me and says, “I need to check what’s going on at home first.”
She winks and I swear to God, my heart races. What the hell is wrong with me? If Vanessa Jackson was around, I’d drag her into the janitor’s closet until I was sure whatever this is was out of my system.
A second later, Kollin turns around and gives me a dirty look that has the same effect.
By the time I get home from football practice, Laney’s already gone. Dad Shanahan catches me in the kitchen. “Your counselor emailed that you never showed for your appointment yesterday,” he says. “Ms. Bennett claims that’s the second one you’ve missed with her. She’s eager to get going on your college planning.”
“I’m on it,” I say, but honestly, it seems like a waste of time.
I rush through dinner and chores and head for my room. I’m running late and still haven’t showered, plus I’m stressing about what we’re going to find at seven o’clock.
I grab my towel and a change of clothes and duck into the bathroom.
While the water warms up in the shower, I lean against the wall and picture Laney this morning, chewing her thumbnail like a chipmunk on crack. It was already red.
My stomach knots.
I step inside and try to clear my head. The stream from the shower drenches me. As I lather up, my fingers brush across the scar on my chest and trigger a memory. All at once, I’m eight years old again.
The rain comes down so hard it hurts, and I’m scared. What if I can’t find Chicago? What if an animal runs out of the woods and attacks me? What if this car coming down the road doesn’t see me in the darkness and hits me?
I leave the shoulder and veer toward a gate in the fence, trudging through the soaking grass. Suddenly, lightning flashes and lights up a yard full of statues and tombstones to my right. The different shapes and outlines look like a mob of shadowed ghosts—squatting, standing, and hunched over, all of them just waiting to get me.
My voice
is trapped in my throat. My feet won’t move. A burst of lightning close behind me sends me flying forward into the swampy soil. The air is still crackling when I push myself up on shaky arms and see the most terrifying sight of all. An enormous winged statue towers above me, pointing at a grave. Is she saying it’s for me? I spin around and sprint as fast I can, slipping and sliding all the way out the gate and onto the road again. Between the wind and thunder and fear, I don’t notice that the car has pulled onto the shoulder behind me.
“Where you going, little man?” a voice calls between thunder claps.
I twist around to see Mr. Shanahan. Delaney must have snitched. I told her to leave me alone, but she never does. She watches me all the time. I’ll get her for tattling.
The rain is pouring down so hard, by the time Mr. Shanahan comes around the car and reaches me, he’s drenched too. Between the storm and the cemetery and not knowing where I’m even going, I’m not sure what to do.
Mr. Shanahan reaches for me, blinking rain out of his eyes. “What’s going on, Talan?”
It’s not that he’s a bad guy, but I need to go home. “I … I’m running away.”
“Why?” He bends over. “Did someone hurt you?”
I shake my head.
Mr. Shanahan squats down in front of me and brushes my sopping bangs from my eyes. “Buddy,” he says over the storm, “I want to help you, but I can’t if you don’t talk to me. Will you get in the car, and we can talk at the house?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to go there. I want to see my mom. She said I could come home after a while.”
His shoulders slump and he sighs so loud I hear it over thunder in the distance. He kneels in front of me and gently grips my shoulders. “Talan, your mom has an addiction. She hasn’t gotten the help she needs yet.”
“I want to go home!” I yell.
His hands squeeze my shoulders. “Your mom’s not there anymore. We can talk about it at the house if you’ll come back with us.”
With us?
I notice Delaney for the first time. She’s watching me from the back seat with her palms and face pressed against the window.
“We’ll take good care of you for as long as you need,” he finishes.
“My mom needs me,” I yell.
“She isn’t there!” Although the wind and rain are pelting his face, he locks his eyes on mine, swallows hard, and says, “Your mom is in jail, buddy. She’s going to be there for a long time.”
“No!”
“I’m sorry. Maybe we can take a trip and visit her in a few months if the school can arrange it. Or maybe we can call her.”
I’m done and I know it. Gram in a nursing home and mom in jail. No home to go to. No family. A cemetery of monsters behind me and a storm everywhere I look. Except straight ahead. Mr. Shanahan kneels in front of me, his jeans soaking in the puddle beneath him, his hands stretched out to help me.
I crumple into his chest. Big, wet arms coil around me. “Let’s go home, buddy.”
We trudge back to the car and Delaney opens the door for me to get in. I shiver and shake in the back seat as Mr. Shanahan pulls a wide U-turn back to the student home. Delaney scoots close and puts her arm around me. She squeezes my arm, right where a scar is.
I shove her hard. “I hate you, you stupid girl.”
“Laney,” Mr. Shanahan says softly. “Let Talan have a little space. Okay?”
I stare out the blurry window to hide my tears. I don’t even move when Laney takes her coat off and wraps it around my shoulders.
I snap out of it and realize how late I must be. Laney is probably already waiting for me at the library. Alone.
As I throw my clothes on, the same thought I’ve had for the last ten years pops into my head: Delaney Shanahan is an annoying do-gooder. But there’s also a second thought I can’t ignore anymore. One that’s always there, too, lurking like a shadow in the background: Delaney Shanahan is the best person I’ve ever known.
I don’t care if it’s the Pillars or the Sevens. If someone hurts her, I’ll fucking kill them.
Ten
My hair is still damp from the shower and I’m wheezing when I reach the library. It’s two minutes to 7:00. Where the heck is she?
The note from the Sevens said something about the rear elevator. I dart for the back of the building, dodging bookcases and pissed librarians. I turn the corner and see Laney in the distance, pushing the up button. She steps inside the elevator and disappears.
I shout, “Hold the door,” but it’s already closing. Frantic, I shove my hand inside the narrow opening and the doors bang my elbow.
“Owwww.” The elevator slowly opens and I collapse against the edge, clutching my sore arm and panting. “You were … gonna leave … without me?”
Laney yanks me inside. “Talan, you scared me to death. Can’t you ever be on time?”
I massage my elbow. “So … what do we do now?”
Laney pulls her copy of the note from her pocket. “I’ve been thinking about this all day and I think I figured it out.” She moves in close to me. “See how it says: ‘Close with two. Seven times the LL. Seven times the HELP’?” Her eyes lift to mine. “I think ‘close with two’ means we push the elevator button for the second floor.”
She leans over and presses the 2 button on the panel before glancing back at the note. “‘Seven times the LL’ must mean we hit the button marked LL seven times.” She bends over and counts out loud as she punches the button for the lower level seven times.
She checks the paper again while I put my hands on my knees to catch my breath.
“The next instruction is ‘Seven times the help.’ That’s got to be the button with the bell. It looks like the word ‘help’ used to be on it but it’s worn off a little.”
She’s right. When I lean close, I can make out the letters.
Laney pushes the help button seven times. The elevator lurches hard. The light reads that we’re bound for floor 2, but the elevator’s actually dropping. It rattles and clangs before stopping abruptly. We reach out for each other to steady ourselves. A moment later, the lights dim.
Now my heart is pounding harder than it did on the sprint over here.
There’s a tremble in Laney’s voice that doesn’t help. “Oh no. I hope we didn’t break it.”
“We?” I smack at the open-door button, but it doesn’t move. “I knew this was a joke.” I press the help button next, but nothing happens so I pound on the door.
All of a sudden, there’s a loud creak behind us. We spin around and watch the back panel of the elevator disappear. It slides completely off to the left, revealing a small, shadowy room behind it.
Holy. Shit.
We latch onto each other like magnets. I can feel her heartbeat racing mine as we stare into the darkness.
After a minute, we unclench and awkwardly back away from each other.
“Still think it’s a joke?” she mutters.
She squeezes my wrist and creeps out the back of the elevator, slowly dragging me with her. The elevator casts enough light to show crumbling, red-brick walls around us. The dank, musty room is suffocating and I’m seriously ready to call this whole thing off. My chest lifts and falls with heavy breaths. We take a few more steps and my foot knocks something over on the concrete floor. Two high-beam flashlights roll at our feet.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
As we bend over to pick them up, the elevator doors whip closed and it starts to ascend. We fumble to get the flashlights turned on and the minute we do, the dark space is shattered with beams like we’re announcing the grand opening of a new morgue.
“Hello?” Laney calls out.
Silence. This is creepy. Like a horror film, and I’m one of those idiots who’s gone down into the haunted basement to see what the noise is instead of running like hell. The flashlight’s decently heavy, but a little pepper spray or some brass knuckles would be nice about now. Hell, I’d take holy water in a spray bottle at this point.
Delaney’s beam settles on the farthest wall. “There’s a tunnel there. Do you see it? Everything else is solid brick.” Her face tightens. “God Talan, what should we do?”
Fear creeps into my voice. “What do you mean, what should we do? You’re the brainiac.” I flick my flashlight at the empty elevator shaft. “I hate to say it, but it looks like our ride left without us.”
“Let me think for a minute.” Laney concentrates on the note, her face as grim as the room around us.
The muscles in my back and neck grow tense. “The darkness is really freaking me out,” I confess. “I think I should tell you—”
Her head jerks up. “That’s it—the darkness! The poem!”
“Huh?”
“The poem we had to memorize: ‘When darkness fills you up with fright, tread straight, straight, straight into the night.’ We’re supposed to go straight into the tunnel.”
“Are you insane? What if it’s a furnace or something?”
“It’s not a furnace, it’s a utility tunnel. I gave parent tours for student council last year, and we talked about how this was a small college before William Singer bought the property. A lot of older colleges used underground tunnels to deliver coal and stuff between the buildings.”
“Okay, fine, so it’s a utility tunnel. Where does it go?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
She takes my arm and tows me forward, but I yank it free. “Wait! I need to tell you something. I, uh … I’m claustrophobic. I don’t know if I can do this.”
She gives me her shut up Talan look and reaches for my hand, but I jerk it away.
Her jaw drops. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you were joking. Wait—we’ve lived half our lives together and I never knew that? How come you never mentioned it before?”
I rub my hands together so she doesn’t see them shake. “Why would I tell anyone that?”
“Well, how come you were fine in the elevator?”
“Elevators are bright and the ride is short. I hate dark, closed spaces. They freak me out.” The muscles in my back and neck feel like rocks.
“I’m sorry.” She stares up the shaft where the elevator abandoned us. “I don’t know what else we can do, though. That tunnel is our only way out now.” She walks over to the passageway and shines her light down it. “The hallway is a decent size, if that helps. It’s just dark.” She looks back at me, pity in her eyes.
Secret of the Sevens Page 5