‘You can end it,’ Lucien in my dream. ‘you have the power to stop it.’
And then the screaming grew so loud it hurt my ears and I realized the sound was coming from me.
‘Move the stones,’ Lucien said and when I looked at him, tears were sliding down his cheeks and his eyes were so full of pain I began to cry myself because I couldn’t stand looking at him and then the chains around him jerked and I looked up at the top of the pit and saw Magdalena. She was sitting up, her back to me, so I couldn’t see her face, but there were worms crawling over her shoulders and neck.”
A shudder worked its way down Kate’s back. Marcus’s throat felt swollen and thick.
“The nightmares were all the same. I would wake up screaming and my mother would be there, holding me. I scared her to death; when she put her arms around me, I could feel her shaking. I did the same thing to my mother that Bo did to you, Marcus. I lied. I told her I didn’t know what the dreams were about. That I didn’t remember. And eventually I’d fall back to sleep and the dream would come again. And again. And again. It was like the moment I closed my eyes, a movie would start up in my head and I couldn’t shut it off. “
“Bo was having the same nightmares?” Gina asked.
Kate nodded.
“So what did you do?” Vinny asked.
Kate tried to smile. “I went crazy, I think. Bo was different. She was the strong one. From the beginning, she wanted to know if it was real. She wanted to know if what I’d seen when we did Ouija could have happened. If the story Lucien told me was true.”
“How could she find that out?” Vinny held out his mug and Kate poured him a fresh cup of coffee.
“The next day, the day after we did Ouija, I told her about the nightmare and she told me she’d had the same one. And then she went home, I thought, to sleep. God knows we were both exhausted, but I was afraid to shut my eyes and so I sat—
--cross legged on her bed, a book open in front of her. Katie’s eyes burned with exhaustion. She was so tired she wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry herself to sleep, but she knew that if she shut her eyes, Lucien would come again.
Katie couldn’t bear it.
She heard someone coming, flying up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time and when the bedroom door burst open, Katie didn’t even bother to look up from her book. “Hi, Bo.”
“Katie!” the bed creaked as Bo flopped down. “You are not going to believe where I’ve been.”
Katie looked up then and saw that Bo was wearing a blue dress, her hair in a pony tail hanging over one shoulder. She even had tights on, and patent leather shoes.
“Did someone die?” Katie asked.
Bo slapped Katie’s leg and wriggled further so that her back was against the wall. “I talked my mother into taking me to the Historical Society. It’s like a museum, kind of, with all this wicked old stuff about Chelsea.”
“Why did you go there?”
“To find out more about that story Lucien told you! If what he said was true, there’d be some kind of record, don’t you think?”
Katie closed the book and leaned over the bed to put it on the dresser. A breeze stirred the curtains, blew them inward. She could smell the sea, sharp and tangy and Katie suddenly wanted to cry again. She swallowed, hard, and looked at Bo closer.
Bo looked awful. There were blue smudges under her eyes, her face was pale. Katie took one of Bo’s hands. “Did you find anything?”
“First let me tell you how I did it.”
“Okay.”
“I told my mother I wanted to do research for a school project.”
“In the summer?”
Bo shrugged. “I told her I wanted to get a head start.”
“And she believed that?”
“Not at first. I really had to make it sound good and finally, she said she didn’t know what I was up to, but if it involved learning more about history, then she’d take me wherever I wanted to go.” Bo took a deep breath. “So I got all dressed up and we went down there. You should see this place, Katie. It’s like a mansion, way up behind City Hall and it’s in the middle of the woods--”
“Now I know you’re lying. There aren’t any woods in Chelsea.”
Bo nodded vigorously. “Yes, there are! Way way up behind the library and there’s this hill that overlooks the whole city. I could see St. Stand’s from there, Katie, truly. Anyway, this mansion was built by the Mayor of Chelsea way back in 1673. Eventually, everyone in his family died and the Historical Society decided to fix it up and make it into a--”
“What does this have to do with--”
“I’m getting to that! Jeez. The lady was telling my mom and me all about the house and everything and then I finally got to tell her that I was interested in ancient crime and punishment.”
“And you said it like that?”
Bo’s eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. “Like what?”
Katie waved her hand, her exhaustion forgotten. “All la tee da like that. Ancient crime and punishment? Jeez Bo, you sound like Sister Patrice!”
“Well, maybe I did, but it worked. The woman at the society said that way back then, punishment was recorded in a journal kept at the meeting house. I think she said the meeting house was a church, but I wasn’t listening really because I wanted to know what the journal was about. So I asked her if any of those journals were kept and she said of course and then she brought me and my mom to this room that’s kind of like a library and she pulled down a book from the shelf – and Katie, the book was wicked big, It was really long and heavy and the binding was all cracked and broken. 1772 was written in gold on the cover and so I said, Have you got any older records? She looked kind of surprised and then said yes, they had older books and was there a particular year I was interested in and I said yes, 1626.”
“Why 1626?”
Bo shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know! It just came into my head and then I had to think up a quick lie because the woman and my mom were looking at me like I’d gone mental. So I told them that everyone in our class had been assigned a year for Chelsea’s history to research and I picked 1626.”
“Did they believe you?”
“They must have because the woman got me the book. She told me I couldn’t touch it with my hands and then she said she’d open it for me and she gave me a pair of gloves because you can’t touch the pages at all. I guess everybody’s got oil and invisible crap on their fingers and that would ruin the parchment. So then she asked me if I was looking for a particular time of year and I remembered you talking about how cold it was but you didn’t say anything about snow, so I said October.”
Bo paused dramatically. Her eyes grew wide. “And Katie! It was true! It really happened!”
“It did?” Katie felt sick again, dizzy and hot.
“In October of 1626 a woman named Magdalena Toskivicth and a man named Lucien de Boskhokska were bricked into a house for crimes against the people.”
“What were their crimes?”
“I didn’t really get it. The ink is so old it’s faded. I could make out Lucien and Magdalena, but I couldn’t understand the rest of it. Whoever wrote that book couldn’t spell at all.”
Bo wriggled and the bed bounced under her weight. “So then my mom and the lady came back and they asked me if I’d found anything interesting and so I said yes, and I asked if the woman had ever heard of criminals being bricked into walls and guess what?”
“What?”
“They did it all the time back then! It was considered good luck or something.”
“They covered them up alive?”
Bo nodded. “I’m going to the Society tomorrow to see if I can figure out what Lucien and Magdalena did. The lady at the society seemed almost as interested as me and she said she’d read over the journal to see if she could figure out the reference.”
Katie leaned against the pillows. Her eyes burned and she needed to cry. “I was hoping I’d imagined the whole thing.”
&n
bsp; “Well, I wasn’t!” Bo said decisively. “If it was a dream, we’re doomed. Think about it, Katie. If it’s real, we can do something about it. If it was all in our imaginations, we’re in trouble because we’re going crazy. Now at least we know there was a man named Lucien and a woman named Magdalena walled into a house. And that means what you saw with the Ouija board is--”
“—real.” A tear slid down Katie’s cheek. Her chin trembled.
Bo wiped the tear away with the tip of her finger. “It means we can fix it. We can make it go away.”
“But how?”
“By doing--”
“—what Lucien asked,” Kate finished. “And what he asked was to be set free.”
“So that’s when you asked us to help,” Vinny said. “Did she go back to the Historical Society?”
“Yes,” Kate said, “but the woman who was going to research Lucien and Magdalena wasn’t there and when Bo asked about her, the woman on duty said that the volunteer Bo had spoken to – Mrs. Maki—had had an accident and been taken ill.”
“Ill?” Vinny repeated and he sounded sick himself. “What was wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. She was old, Bo said. It could have been anything.”
“Or something like Lucien.”
Marcus caught the startled look on Kate’s face.
“What?” she said.
Vinny took a swallow of his coffee before answering her. “Come on, Kate. The librarian or whatever she was looking into Lucien’s past. Do you really think he’d want whatever he did known? At the time, you and Bo were feeling sorry for him and you wanted to help him. And then you started having nightmares and you still wanted to help him so he’d leave you alone. But you didn’t think – either of you—that he was evil. That what he did was wrong. Or that he was …what he was.”
A picture of Bo, when they were eleven, flashed in Marcus’s mind. He remembered looking at her as they walked down the street toward the Forest Field, staring at the line of her jaw, the way her blond hair sparkled in the sun. He remembered how thin her arms were, and how she looked so delicate and soft. Most of all, he remembered her eyes. How they glinted blue-green and flashed when she was angry, and how they could sometimes look coolly amused.
It wasn’t the woman he found himself thinking about. It was the child he had loved first as a friend. That child would not have believed Lucien was evil. She would have trusted, she would have bought his story that he was chained for eternity because of forbidden love. Marcus’s heart was breaking and tears stung his eyes again. Bo had trusted Lucien when they were children; she wouldn’t have believed him as an adult.
“So if this woman was doing research,” Vinny was saying, “She might have found something that would turn you and Bo against him.”
“You’re right,” Kate answered. “Even Bo wouldn’t have wanted to help him if whatever he’d done was evil.”
“I wonder if we could find out what happened to Mrs. Maki,” Gina said.
“What good would it do now?” Alex asked from the shadows. “What difference would that make to anything?”
Gina leaned forward. “We don’t know what happened to her. Her replacement at the Historical Society said she’d an accident. What kind of accident?”
“So what are you proposing to do, Gina? Call her family and ask about something that happened twenty five years ago and then say, ‘hey, that accident she had – it might not have been an accident at all – it might have been a demon named Lucien.’”
“Of course not,” Gina said hotly. “I would never tell her family something like that.”
“Then why go into it at all?”
“Because,” Marcus said, “we have to know how much power he had, even back then. We know what he’s capable of now, but what could he do then? And how did he do it? The more we know about Lucien, the better chance we have of fighting him.”
Kate lowered her head and when she looked up again, Marcus was surprised to see tears glistening in her eyes. “Two days ago, I was terrified,” she said softly. “When I got the call that Bo was dead, I was so scared I could barely think. And yesterday, when Vinny and Marcus told me what happened, I knew it was Lucien, but I didn’t want to believe it. This morning, when the police called, I didn’t know what to do. It was like a weight had settled here,” she touched her chest, “and I was crushed under it. But now I know I’m not alone. You’re here.”
It was Vinny who reached for her first. He took her small hand in his big one and even from where he sat, Marcus could see that Vinny was gripping Kate’s fingers.
“Don’t ever think you’re alone,” Vinny said fiercely. “We’re with you.”
Chapter 22
Lucien
Teddy August leaned into a curve at Blood Hill, the bike almost lying on its side as he rounded the bend. He finished out the curve, gravel spitting from the tires, fanned out behind him. Teddy laughed out loud. The wind was bitter cold; Teddy’s jacket billowed backward like a parachute and he thought maybe we can play parachutes, or maybe we can pretend we’re pilots because the wind is wicked good today.
He pedaled faster, standing on the pegs as he pumped his legs as hard as he could. The fish and packing companies at the wharf loomed up ahead, their windows dark, the parking lot empty because it was a Saturday and the cannery had been closed on weekends ever since the Cheap Kikes had taken over the company. Teddy’s father worked at the company, but only part time now because the Kikes refused to spend a buck taking care of their workers and the Kikes only cared about the bottom line and the bottom line cut the hardworking blue collars off at the knees. Teddy, hearing the words so often he could recite them as well as he could recite the Hail Mary, wasn’t exactly sure what a Kike was, but he thought it meant boss. None of his father’s friends were Kikes.
Teddy pedaled faster, hunching over the handle bars as he whizzed past the Harper and Boritz Fish Company. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the store front windows. A pale ghost boy with brown hair and glasses, small for his age, dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, his feet (the only big thing about him), encased in black high top sneakers. He laughed again and the ghost boy laughed with him and then he was taking the corner, and just ahead was the playhouse.
It wasn’t a play house, not exactly. It was an abandoned factory with broken glass windows and cavernous empty rooms. Rubble littered the scarred and stained concrete floors. James Ross, his best friend, told him that their playhouse used to be butcher shop and Teddy believed him because the floor looked like a floor that had had blood and guts dripped on it. When he heard that cows were slaughtered right where they played, Teddy felt sick and for a couple of days, he hadn’t wanted to play there at all, but then Frankie Caveleska told him James was full of crap; the factory was for canning fish. So Teddy went right back to playing in the factory because while James Ross was his best friend, Frankie Caveleska was always right.
Teddy turned into the lot, swiveling his head left to right first to make sure no one was watching him (they knew enough not to get caught) but the street was empty so he didn’t have to worry. There was an old car parked at the top of Blood Hill, but that was it. Standing on the pedals again, he rode behind the factory, where the weeds had grown into bushes and there was no view from the street. The place where they hid their bikes was empty, so he was the first one to arrive. It didn’t surprise him much. Usually Frankie was here before him, but Frankie’s aunt had died and Frankie was spending a lot of time with his mom.
“I have to,” Frankie had told Teddy two days before. “My mom can’t stop crying and she keeps taking me to my uncle’s house and stuff. She makes me go with her.” He said this last with a twinge of disgust and Teddy August didn’t have to ask why. Frankie was a kid and he was forced to spend hours with adults. Adults only saw kids when they said hello or good bye, and in between, anyone under five feet tall fell below their sight line.
When Teddy visited his own relatives, he spent less than ten minutes t
alking to them and then he was shooed away and told to “amuse yourself” which really meant go watch TV. That was okay, he supposed, but it was also boring. And poor Frankie had been doing it for more than a week.
James would be here any minute. It was James who had called, asking, “Wanna play?” and when Teddy said sure, why not, James hesitated and then whispered into the phone, “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?” Teddy had asked.
“About Frankie’s aunt.”
“Shoot,” Teddy said, “Everybody knows she’s dead.”
“Not that,” James said in a whispered rush, “She was murdered!”
Teddy’s mouth had dropped open and he waited for the details, but James said he’d tell him everything at the playhouse.
Teddy pulled his bike behind the weeds, lying it down so that unless someone came right up to it, they wouldn’t see it in the grass and the scrub brush. The factory was boarded on three sides by other factories, the front faced the street and ocean. The distance between the factories was wider than the alleyway that ran between his apartment house and the one next door, but not by much. When Teddy stood with his arms straight to the sides, he could almost touch the two buildings.
Frankie Caveleska could already touch the walls, but that was because Frankie was huge.
Looking around quickly again, Teddy slid behind the Harper Cannery and tiptoed to the bottom left window. Like the other factories that dotted the landscape around the ocean, this one was brick, with long narrow windows. The bottom windows had been boarded up for years; graffiti covered the boards and brick, but up high, the windows were unprotected, most the panes broken.
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