* * *
The bell rang. Wiping my face and patting the glass shard in my pocket, I ducked into the hall and made my way to English literature. When I took my seat in the back corner, Courtney and her friends moved their desks away, creating a plague circle around my desk. The teacher didn’t say anything, because this was Derleth Academy and Courtney Haynes was Queen.
“Got the bubonic plague?” Trey smirked at me, drumming his fingers on my desk as he strode past on the way to the back row. I stared at my hands. I didn’t have an answer. The shard weighed heavy in my pocket.
The shunning continued through the rest of the day. As I wrote a quote on the board in class, Amber muttered the ring-around-the-rosie nursery rhyme under her breath. Students crossed themselves in the hallway as I went past, as though I was a vampire. When I arrived at my locker, a symbol had been drawn on it in red paint.
What was weird was that the symbol looked almostexactlylike the rune I’d seen tattooed on Quinn and Trey’s wrists.
“It’s to ward off evil,” Courtney hissed as she sauntered past, her arm looped in Quinn’s. She dragged him away before he could say anything, but his eyes met mine over his shoulder. He looked almost… sheepish. But I was probably imagining that.
Why is Quinn’s tattoo on my locker door?
When my last class was finished I went straight to my room, slipping a note in Greg’s locker asking him to cover for me at rehearsal. I collapsed on my bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rats scrabbling through the walls. For once, I found them a comfort. The rats knew their place.
I must have drifted off to sleep. I didn’t even hear Loretta come in. The next thing I knew, I found myself standing somewhere cold and damp, a slippery darkness wrapping around me. A rancid smell that was too much like the rotting meat in my locker invaded my nostrils until I choked for air.
I thrust my hands out in front of me, stumbling forward until I touched a wall. My fingers scraped cold stone.Where am I? Am I in the corridor? Where’s the door to our room?My eyes strained to see the gloom. Something flickered in the distance. A flame? Was something on fire?
My chest tightened. The hairs on my arms stood on end.If there’s a fire, then why am I so cold?
And where am I that the very air seems drenched with death?
A sound penetrated the gloom. Scritching, like the sound that came from the walls in my bedroom, only louder and brighter and more terrifying as it echoed through vast chambers and deep crevices, through all the dark places where nightmares dwelled.
Scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch.
Hundreds of tiny feet descended upon me. The incessant scratch and scrape of claws on stone crawled on my consciousness. My head swam with dizzying fear, a fear all the greater because I could not confirm it. I could not see what descended upon me.
Was it death, visiting me at last to take me to my mother, to place me into Dante’s arms? Then why, instead of opening myself up to it, did my mind rebel from it? Why did my skin itch and my throat close as if it wasn’t death that came scritching for me along the walls, but some nameless, unheard-of thing even more abhorrent?
They’re coming for me… The rats in the walls…
I woke with a start, my heart pounding in my chest. A thin shaft of golden light had started its journey across our bedroom wall, indicating the path of the rising sun. The ancient alarm clock read 4:45. Ratsscritch-scritchedacross the ceiling. Everything perfectly normal, perfectly as it should be.
It was just a nightmare. It wasn’t real…
The cold, clamminess of my dream still clung to my skin. I struggled to suck in a breath, my throat still closed from the foul smell my imagination had conjured up. I tried to sit up. Something like a rubber band grabbed the back of my head and snapped it back against the pillow. There was asquelchingsound and a warm wetness around my ears, like my head was resting on Jell-O.
I raised a hand to my face, swiping it through something wet and sticky under my head, and sniffed. My head swam from the fumes. It smelled like a road.
Tar. It’s tar.
But why is there tar on my pillow…
I swung myself out of bed and grabbed the door handle. Locked tight. But I knew that didn’t mean anything. Courtney and Trey had someone sneak in here and take my journal. I thought they had bribed the woman who took my suitcase, but I realized that they could easily have made a copy of my key.
They broke in here in the night and put tar on my pillow. But why—
My eyes struggled to make out the shapes of furniture. The fumes closed my nose, choking me. White lights danced in front of my eyes. My steps felt slow, sluggish, as though I was moving through molasses.
I staggered into the corner of Loretta’s bed. She sat up, her armsloooooowlyreaching out, grabbing my wrist. The movement nearly sent me sprawling.
“What’s going on? Who’s in here? Oh, Hazel, it’s just you—” Loretta’s words died. She choked. “Hazel, the fumes… your hair—”
My hair?
My hand flew to my head, for the first time taking stock of what they’d done. When I felt my dreadlocks, I screamed and screamed and screamed.
