None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1)

by Laura Giebfried

Jack glanced over at me inquiringly but quickly looked away again. His brow had furrowed in uncertainty of how to proceed.

  “We could use it, Jack,” I said. “We could get away from here.”

  We paused on the corner outside of the store. Jack stared at me with his hands in his pockets but still didn’t speak.

  “We could just pack up and leave,” I said. “Go to France. Barker’s done for, there’s nothing to worry about ... We could finally do it.”

  His expression was unreadable. It occurred to me that after what had happened to Miss Mercier he might have no longer harbored the same excitement to go. Still, as we stood in the cold air, the idea of staying in New England seemed unbearable at best, and going anywhere that was far enough away seemed to be the answer.

  “What do you think?” I said. “I mean, I know it won’t be the same, but ... do you still want to go with me? Despite everything?”

  He stood in shock momentarily, but then his expression broke into a smile.

  “You’re the only one I’d go with, Nim,” he said. “In fact, I can count the other people I’d go with on Rochester’s amputated hand.”

  “Good to know.”

  We flitted into the corner store and he indicated to the Parliaments behind the counter. As I pulled out some money to pay for them, the man behind the register sighed.

  “Prep school boys, are you?”

  “I’m old enough to smoke,” Jack said, reaching for his ID.

  “Nah, that’s not what I meant,” the man said, waving the card away. “Only, I hoped you’d of been in here to fill out the application for the job.”

  He indicated to the Help Wanted sign in the window as he rang up the charge. As I slid the money towards him, I quickly murmured, “Right. Sorry.”

  “Nah, it’s alright. Just the last girl’s gone and run off on me, without so much as giving her notice, and I’ve been working both shifts all week.”

  I stopped midway through reaching for the change; beside me, Jack’s hand had frozen where he was pocketing the cigarettes.

  “What do you mean, she ‘ran off?’” he asked.

  “Just that: she ran off. Called her house and her parents said she never came home. Hardly a surprise. Seems to be a new trend with kids these days ...”

  He shook his head in irritation, but neither Jack nor I copied the sentiment. My hand had gone very cold and the metal of the coins seemed to burn against the skin.

  “When did this happen?” Jack asked quickly. “Was this – was this weeks ago?”

  “Nope. Just last Friday.”

  “But ...”

  He bit down on his jaw to keep from saying anything more, though I knew every word that was crossing his mind from the look in his eyes. We exited the store wordlessly and he veered off down the street. I had to hurry to keep up with him, and struggled to hear his voice over the wind pooling into my ears.

  “How could that be?” he said restlessly. “Barker had the heart-attack the week before that – he couldn’t’ve gone and killed someone else!”

  “Maybe it’s ... maybe it’s something else. Maybe she actually ran away.”

  “What – like the other girls actually ran away? That doesn’t make sense, Nim!”

  “No, I mean ... maybe she really thought her friends ran away, so she decided to, too ...”

  But even as I said it, I knew that it wasn’t true. My heart was pounding as I realized what the store-keeper’s statement meant, and my face was hot despite the cold air. Jack slowed as we reached the woods and turned to face me through the trees.

  “How could we have gotten it wrong?” he said, running a hand through his hair in frustration. “How could it not be Barker?”

  We had stopped in a clearing and a light wind fell down upon us to rattle the surrounding trees. As I shivered in the chill, it occurred to me that we were standing where Miss Mercier had been killed. Jack was looking at me for an explanation, but the only one I had to give was the same one that he had already figured out.

  I shut my eyes in defeat.

  “But we found the file!” he said. “And it made sense – it all made sense! It had to have been Barker – it was supposed to be him –”

  As he broke off and turned away, I dropped my eyes to the snow-covered ground. The piddling suspicions that I had ignored warning me that Barker had not been the one to commit such crimes came back to me with full-force, and it occurred to me that we had both wanted it to be him so badly that we had ignored the explanations of why it was not.

  And it weighed down over us and closed in around us with the surrounding trees so strongly that it was a wonder we didn’t suffocate. Every aspiration that we had rediscovered after Barker’s hospitalization had been sucked from the air along with any hope of fulfilling our plans to get away from the island. I couldn’t have breathed even if I wanted to.

  “I just wanted it to be done,” Jack said. “You told me that it didn’t seem right, but I wanted it to be over, so I just ignored it.”

  “It seemed like it was Barker. Everything pointed to him – we had the cause, the routes he took, the file …”

  “I should have known about that file: it was just the documents on the investigation. The police gave it to him to pretend like they were doing something, and he probably shoved it away and never looked at it again …”

  The wind subsided and we were left to stand in the frigid air. All around us the island looked dead and cold, and without the thought of escaping to someplace else, it seemed to latch around our ankles.

  “We’re never going to figure it out,” Jack said.

  I shut my eyes. The soft sound of piano music had begun to flit through the trees, and it clogged my ears disturbingly. As I shook my head to try and clear it, I knew that I couldn’t take having another unsolved riddle twisting through my thoughts.

  “We’ll figure it out. We have to.”

  “How?” Jack said. “We just spent months chasing nothing – we wasted all that time looking for something that wasn’t there.”

  “That’s not true; we still have all the research and evidence. We just have to go over it again and figure it out.”

  It took the entire walk back to Bickerby to convince him of as much, and even then his expression was cluttered with disheartenment. When we returned to the room, I pushed away the remaining assignments that I had to do to clear a space on my bed and he dug out the file folder. He took a long breath before opening it and then laid the information back out on the bed.

  The familiar sight of the maps with dozens of pen marks scribbled over them and the various newspaper articles dug into my stomach, and when I looked at the pictures of the girls’ faces again, the imprint of their smiles burned across my eyes.

  “Alright, so it’s got to be someone at the school,” Jack said as we stared down at the notes, “since we’ve already confirmed that it’s no one in town.”

  “But can we really be sure?”

  He took a seat next to me and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. Any enthusiasm that he had had for the unsolved crime was long gone by now.

  “Towns weed out weirdoes, but boarding schools are breeding grounds for all sorts of trouble.” He gave me a look. “If you’d read Jane Eyre, you’d realize that.”

  “Did someone get murdered in her boarding school?”

  “No, but that’s beside the point. What I’m saying is that it has to be someone at this school – student or faculty.”

  “Right, but does it? I mean, look at it this way: the killings started with girls on the island. They had nothing to do with Bickerby at all until Miss Mercier got involved. And she only got involved because one of her students said something – and he was from the town. So maybe it is a townsperson.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “It could be – it makes sense.”

  Jack shook his head and Dictionary hopped up into his lap. She mewed as he scratched behind her ears, happy that we had not completely forgotten her in our fascination wi
th her previous owner’s murderer.

  “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “The killings follow a school schedule. I read through the census, and I’ve looked around town – there’s no one who leaves the island on summers except for the students and half the faculty and staff.”

  “Right. But ... maybe there’s another explanation for that, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know – maybe he purposefully takes summers off to divert suspicion.”

  “Maybe he purposefully takes summers off to divert suspicion?” Jack repeated, his voice heavy with skepticism. “First of all, Nim, what suspicion are you talking about? As far as anyone’s concerned, only one crime has been committed on this island – and no one’s very concerned about that, even. Secondly, if there’s someone out there who’s smart enough to commit a dozen crimes without raising suspicion and who would go so far as to cover his tracks by taking summers off to point the police – who aren’t even looking for him – in another direction altogether, why in the world would he be living on this island? A guy like that has to have more aspirations in life than to be here.”

  I sighed.

  “Good point.” My eyes dropped down to the student files in my hands. “I just don’t get how it can be someone here.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know ... Don’t you think it’s weird that someone’s killed a bunch of people? I mean, it could be someone that we know. A lab partner, even.”

  “It’s not my lab partner,” Jack said dryly. “He couldn’t even figure mitosis out.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “It’s not so hard for me to believe,” he said. “I mean, think of it this way: they’re hundreds of boys here, all away from their parents, who’ve put completely unrealistic expectations on them; they’ve got no outlet for their problems or anger, because Barker runs this place with authoritarianism; and the only women around are – allegedly – unreachable. I’m surprised there’s only one person running around killing people.”

  “Alright, I guess you’re right ...”

  “I usually am.”

  He gave me his usual smirk, though it was only a halfhearted attempt. As we stretched out to split up the various papers that we had compiled weeks beforehand to go over any information that we might have missed, he let out a long sigh.

  “We’ll figure it out, Jack,” I said.

  “And if we don’t?”

  I didn’t respond. In the silence the piano music returned to filter through my ears and fill my head. As it crept into my thoughts with memories of my mother, I noisily flipped through pages to try and mask the sound. All that I knew was that if we didn’t find the answer, I would forever be in search of the answer, just like her.

  Ch. 20

  I stepped down the row of desks to get to Albertson’s and gently laid the makeup exam from the one I had missed on his desk. He smiled as he looked up from his work and adjusted his glasses to look it over.

  “Did it go well?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No questions?”

  I shook my head and hesitantly took a step back, hoping that I could return to the residence building before it got too late, when Albertson spoke again.

  “I was just going over your homework assignments,” he said. “I applaud you for getting them done so quickly.”

  I forced a smile but dropped my eyes to the floor. The assignments that Jack had done were undoubtedly filled with mistakes, and I was certain that Albertson could tell that I had not been the one to complete them.

  “Right, well ... I may have done them a bit too quickly, Mr. Albertson. I ... I know they’re not my best work.”

  “No, not your best. But given the circumstances ...” He offered another kind smile and put the paper he was holding down. “I’m very pleased with the time and effort you put in, Enim. It shows me how hard you’re trying, even when I know there are other things on your mind.”

  “Right.”

  The flatness in my voice was evident; Albertson cleared his throat before going on.

  “I did want to point out just a few things that were wrong, given the importance of the subject matter. Do you have another minute or so?”

  Despite my desire to leave, I could hardly act as though I had to rush off to class given that it was the end of the day. I withheld a grimace and gave a stiff nod, and Albertson moved the graded assignment to lie on the desk between us.

  “You seemed to get the gist of the beginning section, but right around the midway mark the translation got a bit muddled. The issues begin with your translation of ‘damnatio memoriae’ as ‘damned memories.’ It’s not accusative, remember, so it’s not the memories themselves that are undesirable, it’s the lack of remembrance that is. Does that make sense?”

  “Not ... not really, Mr. Albertson.”

  “To the Romans, the worst thing was not death: it was having their life erased from history. This practice was the ultimate punishment – worse than torture or humiliation or death – because it meant that the victim would never be known throughout history, or remembered, or even thought of again. He wasn’t just gone from life: he was gone from the world.”

  He paused to look at me with his old, pale eyes, and suddenly the room seemed very dry. I stared at the line that he was indicating to but the words were blurred with sorrow.

  “So ‘damnatio memoriae’ truly means ‘condemnation of memory.’ It’s not just dismissing someone, it’s the act of wiping away every memory of them until they can never be thought of again.” He paused again when I made no indication that I had heard him, and his eyes had gone very still and silent. “No one wants to be forgotten, Enim.”

  “Right.”

  The word came out as barely more than a breath. I quickly thanked Albertson and slipped away out the door, tugging at my shirt collar as I went to try and breathe more deeply. Once outside, I crossed to the Center Garden and took a seat on one of the stone benches. The cold could barely shock my senses as my mind finally turned to thoughts that I had tried so hard to keep away.

  She was gone. I had told myself it over and over again, even before her life had fully finished, and yet it still didn’t seem real. She would never walk along the beach again, or sit beside me at the piano, or open her eyes and look over at me with a smile. Already I could barely remember the way she would brush my hair from my eyes when it got too long, or the way her laugh sounded gently over the phone, or of how we could say things to one another that no one else understood.

  And soon enough, the last imprints of her would fade from my memory, too. The room at the end of the hallway would be cleared out and made into something different when the house was sold, and the broken piano would be donated to someone who would never play the aria upon it again, and the tombstone that no one would visit would weather, and she, too, would fade from the world with everything she had ever and never done.

  The grounds were nearly empty, and the sun had begun to set behind the trees. I stared at it even though the vivid orange burned against my eyes until it sunk into the ocean, and all at once I wondered what had happened to the girls who had done the same. They had sunk beneath the waves, as well, though they would not resurface in the morning, and no one would wait for them to reappear in the days to come. They were gone without being mourned, thought to have run away when they had been killed, and so their memory would be tainted with the type of displeasure that they didn’t deserve; they would be thought of in passing, perhaps, with a type of irritation reserved for those who could be so thoughtless as to run away and never so much as send word back home. They would be lifeless and grave-less all at once, and their memories would be lost like their lives out at sea.

  And Miss Mercier would be forgotten in the same way. Her memory clung as tightly as it could to the classroom that had once been hers, and the notice board in the hallway in the Foreign Language Building where her memorial was still pin
ned up in pictures and farewells, but its grip was slowly releasing. By the next semester there would be a permanent replacement occupying her room, and the board would be covered with more present concerns. The clearing where she had been killed would camouflage back into the rest of the forest, the ground indistinguishable beneath the trees. Her memory was being condemned due to her horrid death. The thoughts of her were marred by the way that she had been killed, and it was easier to forget her than to try and think of her without the brutality of the crime that had struck the campus.

  That was what had happened to them, and that was what would happen to us all. We would die and the world would carry on without us. There was no other way that it could be – to hold onto the deceased’s memory was like distributing poison throughout the soul. The memory haunted every unused space within the mind, filling it up with laughter that would never be heard again and words that would never be spoken. It dragged the heart down beneath the ground where the decomposing body laid, and once there, there was no way to pull it back up again. It was a choice between forgetting and moving on, or remembering and staying still. The world would continue regardless of whether or not I went with it.

  “You shouldn’t think about it.”

  I jumped at the voice and nearly fell off the bench: Cabail Ibbot was seated next to me. He was so small that his legs hung above the ground, and his little feet made no imprint in the snow.

  “How long have you been there?” I asked, righting myself and smoothing down the creases in my pants.

  “A while.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you might need help figuring it out.”

  “Figuring what out?”

  “What’s on your mind.”

  He turned his magnified, bug-like eyes towards me, but I couldn’t see my reflection in the darks of his eyes.

  “You’re looking at the wrong part,” he said. “And you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

  “Wrong part of what?”

  “Of what’s bothering you.”

  “You don’t know what bothers me, Cabail,” I said irritably.

  “Not completely. But I don’t think you know that, either.”