Shattered Silence

by Ron C. Nieto

  I should know the procedure. I used it every single time I logged on these decrepit computers.

  Now, there were two places this file of Perkins's could be: the computer's hard drive, in which case I'd have a hell of a time finding out which computer was his usual one, or floating around the school cloud. When papers were due and right before exams, the labs could get a decent attendance, so it was safer to save to the cloud so you could access your work from anywhere. There were drawbacks, like everyone else having access to your work, but then again, most people didn't know what to look for even if they came up with the idea of stealing your homework anyway. The files were saved with inspirational names such as AFOSTH.doc or any other letter combination born of a well-placed punch to the keyboard.

  So, where's your file, Perkins?

  Instead of trying to comb the virtual space for a document that might not exist, I launched the calculus program. It was pretty advanced and I only identified about half the options, but I didn't need to operate it. I just needed to find the correct file extension.

  That should narrow down the search process, a lot. If I were sure this was his computer, I could've checked the program's history but short of that... an extension search was the best I could do.

  The computer took its time before spitting its answer. There was one local file and three more in the virtual space. The local one turned out to be the program's demo, so I discarded that one from my search. The other three... those were more interesting. klm.calc, jcjhniea.calc, serene.calc. I went for the one with a readable name first because it was atypical, but the contents looked like scraps of old homework.

  I shouldn't have been surprised. There was nothing about a Beatrice-induced work that could be considered serene, after all.

  klm.calc was almost blank. There were the beginnings of a promising equation, but nothing else.

  The last file was another story. I recognized the main equation as the one outlined in klm.calc, but the rest? The rest was so beautifully complex it turned to gibberish. The stuff in there was advanced, college level if I was any judge, nested and transformed and derived as appropriate to fill the screen, chaotic enough and elegant enough to bear Beatrice's seal. I was familiar with the link between math and music and had played around a little with the concept, but what I was seeing was well beyond my understanding, so I fumbled with the program to give me the answer instead. There should be a graphic button in every math program worth its name.

  The school PC suffered when I found it. It fired up at top performance and struggled for a moment long enough that I thought I had fried state property, but finally it gave me a graph. It was an unnatural periodic—something entirely random that had been turned into a periodic through an operation—and there were more dimensions than I would've believed. Not just your average x-y-z axis, but also k, j, w, s... The image almost blurred in the screen with so many intersections.

  I leaned back in the chair.

  It was Wyatt's fractal print, in black and white and with graphing paper in the background.

  “Sometimes, I hate being right,” I muttered.

  I checked the time. The first period was gone, as well as half of second, and the morning break was approaching fast. An idea began to form in my mind, and it didn't look too good. But it was the only one I had at the moment, so I decided to go along before I had time to think it through. Quickly, I shut down the computer, making sure to leave everything as it was, and headed outside.

  When I reached the door, it opened by itself and almost slammed my face. I jumped back and stared at it for a split second.

  “Mr. Brannagh?” said our computer science teacher, clearing his throat. The man looked at me askew, and I guessed I had just given him the scare of his life—as much as he had given me mine. “May I ask what you're doing here?”

  “I wasn't feeling right,” I lied through my teeth. Navigating my way around the truth was getting easier and easier, and I didn't necessarily like it. “I needed to sit down for a moment, and I thought the computer lab was quiet and dark enough.”

  He looked over my shoulder, the room silent and untouched, and then studied my face. Most teachers would have taken in my looks of juvie delinquent, found me guilty of spending class hours on Facebook and sent me off to the headmaster's office with a note, but Mr. Kent asked, “Shouldn't you have gone to the nurse for that?”

  Benefit of the doubt. That was improvement.

  “I didn't want to be sent home,” I said as convincingly as I could. Since I had just been scared to death and back, and had found further proof that the bloody ghost who tried to kill me was still around, I'm pretty sure it didn't take much acting to look like a walking corpse. “I just needed a moment.”

  “Drop by the nurse anyway and tell her to give you something, a tea at the very least. There's no point in joining second period when it's nearly over and it might help you feel better before your next class starts.”

  “I will. Thank you, Professor Kent,” I said, hiding a sigh of relief. I headed off toward the central office, where the infirmary was, walking normally and not looking back, but the moment I got a wall between me and the computer lab, I changed directions and headed for the fire door.

  Ditching Alice during break didn't sound like a remotely good plan, more so when I had no guarantee that it would work, but I tried not to think about it and pushed the door open. I was breaking a lot of rules in just one day, so who cared about one extra?

  I circled over to the parking lot and checked the building's windows overlooking it. There weren't many. The first floor had the front door, the second floor housed the library, the third had the bio lab and I hoped whoever was there had something better to do than look out the window, like dissecting a frog.

  I checked the time again. Ten minutes to go before classes were over and break started. Looking around, I realized I had no idea which car I should be stalking, but I moved to the best parking area and settled down to wait, resting my back against a lone tree that could act as coverage in case someone decided to take an interest from the building.

  A guy from some sports team passed me by with a strange look but no comment. A small group of people gave the parking lot a wide berth and moved toward the quad. I stood up when I heard the high heels, though, and there she was, two cars over, beeping open the doors to a pretty red Cabrio. She didn't look at me, but I almost tasted her disdain in the air when I covered the distance between us.

  “Lena,” I called softly.

  “Why don't you keel over and die?” she said, bending over to retrieve something from her car and not looking at me.

  “That was your plan, right?”

  I hadn't thought this conversation through. If anything, I expected her to deny it, to call me crazy, to turn around with a toss of her head and go back to her friends. Instead, she said, “And it would have made the world a better place.”

  The venom behind her words pushed me back a step. “You told Mr. Herdford about me for theater because you knew about Beatrice,” I said, trying to regain my mental footing.

  She slammed her car door shut and beeped it closed. “I'll not be seen with you in public, freak,” she said, turning around and starting for the quad.

  “I was your target. It wasn't some jealous crap, and it wasn't a popularity contest,” I called out, my voice getting louder without me realizing it. “It was never about Alice, was it?”

  She barked a laugh and whirled to face me. “Alice!” she said, her lips stretching in a feral grin. “But of course it was about her! Everything that happens now will be her fault, because she started this shit.”

  Lena resumed walking and I let her go. Her words echoed in my head, and the cold fingers of dread gripped the back of my neck. I wasn't blind. I'd noticed the accidents happening around her, same way I'd noticed the link between the many people suddenly needing psychiatric help in school. But I had always assumed that was a consequence of my escaping Beatrice.
>
  I had never thought she could be a catalyst.

  Chapter 14

  Alice wasn't happy to see me when classes were over, not after having missed the break. She was already frowning, and I hadn't yet told her where I'd been.

  We walked to my place in mostly silence—she didn't give me the cold shoulder, but it was clear she needed to know why I had left her waiting like an idiot. I'd have been pissed too, not just because it's not a nice thing to do, but also because with the way things stood, it was too easy to imagine a dark reason behind the absence.

  I opened my front door and motioned her inside. The house was too empty and quiet without Sparrow to greet me and hours away from my father coming from work, but the lack of interruptions would help us.

  After dropping our things in my room, I led the way to the kitchen. Coffee, however instant it might be, was especially welcome when the cold January afternoon felt tropical to the icy chill in my veins. Alice sat in a stool to watch while I fussed around, making hers the way she liked it on autopilot.

  “So,” she started when I placed the mug in front of her, “what's up?”

  “You got around to reading my text, right?”

  “Yeah. And I'm not saying I don't agree or that it's not possible, but I'm a bit... lost. How did you get to that conclusion again?”

  “I missed my first classes this morning,” I began. “I was late anyway, and there was something I wanted to see. There was no way for me to get a print, but I found the part Perkins contributed to the project with Wyatt, the one he had been working on before jumping into an empty pool headfirst.”

  “I won't even ask how you accessed his files. Just tell me what sense you made of what you found.”

  “Remember when I explained that fractal art is arithmetic at work? That the proportions were so perfect because it was a function shaping them and not an artist's free hand?” She nodded. “Most advanced math software can do simple graphs too. It's not the same level of detail, and the options wouldn't allow you to create anything truly impressive, but they show you the function's shape, and that's the skeleton of any fractal art.”

  Alice gripped her mug, turned it between her hands. “And the graph was familiar.”

  I nodded.

  “And that's connected to Beatrice... Are we sure about that?”

  In response, I got up and fetched Wyatt's print from my room. Straightening it on the table with the side of my fist, I grabbed a pen and marked the graph's lines behind the compound.

  “It's not exactly the same line, this one's a little bit more accurate perhaps, but trust me. They're the same function.”

  “I'm not doubting that,” she said.

  “You're failing to see what it has to do with Sara dancing to the song and then slapping you.”

  “Can you blame me? You're not making it that clear.” She smiled, more insecure than she ever looked.

  “Just watch,” I said.

  Using the pen, I began to tap the rhythm of the minuet we were both so familiar with. I skipped the beginning and went straight for the part where it lost definition and she stiffened, but said nothing. Then, slowly, I began to change that rhythm into the still chaotic but more uniform pattern I had settled for when doing the transcription.

  “I don't understand,” she whispered. “What am I supposed to see?”

  “This.” I moved to tap over the print, following the distinctive points in the graph. The curves and angles were placed so that their distance measured perfectly with the tapping, and just moving from one point to the other at a consistent speed resulted in the exact pattern without any effort on my side.

  “Okay, I see it now. You can stop.” Alice angled back from the table, as if putting distance between herself and the drawing would help.

  “That's not even the worst of what you have to see today,” I said with a sigh.

  “Learning that a ghost that should be gone is still lingering around isn't the worst part?”

  “Considering dumping me yet?” I asked with a smirk to hide the truth of the question.

  That shook her out of it and a decided, stubborn look replaced her scared one. “Never. Out with it.”

  “I... kind of talked to Lena over break. The plan was to corner her, but it didn't go over exactly as predicted.”

  “So you didn't come to pick me up and didn't spend time with me because you were running after the school's Bitch Queen? No wonder you thought I'd get mad.”

  “Hey, I'm trying to be serious.”

  “So am I. That's quite the serious offence in boyfriend protocol,” she said, leaning in and digging her finger into my chest. “But if that wasn't what worried you... Then I might have to start worrying.”

  Her sudden closeness was distracting in ways Lena could never hope to be. I closed my hand around hers and trapped it against my body, keeping her within arm's distance.

  “It might not have been the smoothest move ever, but I kind of accused her of plotting to kill me.”

  Her jaw dropped open. “You didn't.”

  “Did too.”

  “Like, you walked up to her and her cronies and told her, ‘Hey, sashaying bitch, I know you wanted me dead!' and somehow this sounded like a good idea at the time?”

  “It sounded like a good idea. There were no cronies around, for starters.”

  She sighed. “Next time you try to intimidate an answer out of someone, be a good boy and tell me first.”

  I smiled in spite of the seriousness of the situation. “It kind of worked.”

  “She cackled with glee and said that yes, it was her fault?”

  “More like she snorted but yeah, she said she knew about Beatrice.”

  Much like had happened to me, the confession froze all the fun out of her. “No way.”

  “That's not all. She also said”—I held her hand tighter, watching her face for a reaction—”that it all started because of you.”

  After having broken one of the mugs, cleaned the mess and prepared a new batch of drinks—tea this time—Alice and I moved to my living room. It was much smaller than hers, but I welcomed the coziness because feeling her curled up against me, her presence solid and real, was the kind of anchor I needed. She craved that closeness as much as I did, and little by little, her confusion and her shaking ebbed away.

  “We're missing something,” she said after sipping her chamomile tea. “If this is a puzzle, then we don't have one of the corner pieces and it's not allowing us to see the whole picture.”

  “So what pieces do we have at the moment?” I ticked my fingers as I counted. “One Victorian girl turned murderous ghost. A family tree. A list of dead people in her way. One complete song. Three bat-shit crazy students who are still alive and seem to recover.”

  “Two composers,” Alice mused.

  “More than two, I bet. She feasted on artists, and musicians would be a reasonable favorite.”

  “But two important ones—the one who started the song and the one who finished it. Andrew and you. What do you two have in common that no one else has?”

  “You might be onto something there.” It was far-fetched, but this whole thing was absurd anyway.

  “We should look more closely at his life then. There might be something about him.”

  “There're a lot of big families that just disappear, and the fact that this was all pre-internet era's going to bog down the process, but it's worth a shot. Getting more info on this guy and, by proxy, the events surrounding Beatrice's existence and death can't hurt.”

  “Let's visit the library again tomorrow. We'll use the computers for search and, if we find some kind of reference, we can try the paper archives like last time.”

  “I bet the librarian's going to be thrilled to see us again,” I said drily.

  “I can't fit Lena in our plan,” she added after a moment.

  “No, this certainly doesn't give her a reason or a means.”

  “Tell m
e again about the conversation. From the beginning.”

  I did, trying to recall the exact words. For an epic confrontation, it had been pretty short. When I was done, Alice sat up with a frown.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “We'll visit the paper archive section tomorrow after all... I want to look over those old articles again.”

  “What for?”

  “You said we had a list of dead people, but it's not a complete one. I want to find all the strange deaths we might've missed and jot down the ones we did find.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “The answer, I think. I'll know when I see it.”

  And she wouldn't tell me before that, even though I could practically see the hypothesis chasing each other around in her head. She fingered her necklaces, as if the cold metal could help focus her mind, and then she sprung up from the couch.

  “Okay. We've got to be wide awake for tomorrow, so I'd better go home, do my homework, and get some rest.”

  “I'll walk you home,” I said, getting up from the couch and going to fetch our jackets and her bag from my room.

  “I won't say no to that,” she said, wrapping her arms around my shoulders with a bright smile that was in stark contrast with her previous worry.

  I didn't question her. I preferred to push all the doubts out of my mind for the time being and just enjoy having her.

  Later, when I dropped her off in her front lawn, I held her close, capturing her with a tight grip around the waist.

  “Please, don't do anything stupid,” I whispered.

  “You think I have a plan I'm not sharing,” she said, grinning and tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck.

  I nodded.

  “I do,” she confirmed.

  “Alice, please, I'm begging...”

  “But”—she cut me off with a finger against my lips—”it's not the ‘go off to face danger alone and get myself killed in the middle of the night' kind of plan.”