I nodded.
“Well, you’re about to get up close and personal with their master.”
I swallowed hard. Ayaz’s words should be ridiculous to me, and yet… those shadows… I thought at first they were the rats in the walls, but they were too large, too human-like. No human could move like that, floating with silent footsteps, black cloaks billowing around them like a tornado formed of darkness…
“How?” I managed to croak out. “How are you all dead?”
Quinn squeezed my hand. “You found that newspaper article about the old school that used to be here – Miskatonic Prep. It was shut down twenty years ago after a tragic fire killed 245 students.”
I nodded.
“ThisisMiskatonic Prep. Everyone here – the students, some of the staff and maintenance crew – we all died in that fire.” Quinn’s voice was swallowed by the darkness. “Our parents buried us in the cemetery beyond the pleasure garden. We woke up inside our coffins, and had to dig ourselves out. Now we don’t age, we can’t be killed, and we can’t leave the grounds of the school.”
I snorted. “You’re not a zombie, Quinn. You’ve done many evil things to me, but you haven’t yet tried to eat my brain.”
“We’re not zombies,” Trey snapped. “We’re… I was never allowed to watch horror films. Not cultured enough for my parents. I don’t know the proper term.”
“Revenants,” Quinn added. “I always liked ‘revenants.’ It has a biblical ring to it, like I’m going to enter a paradise of nubile virgins at the end of all this nonsense.”
“In Turkey, we talk of theedimmuof ancient Mesopotamia,” said Ayaz. “They are the souls of the dead who are not properly buried. They rise from their graves to seek vengeance on the living.”
“Edimmu sounds like a kind of cheese,” Quinn shot back. “I don’t want to be a cheese zombie unless they get the best virgins.”
I rubbed my temples, smearing cold mud across my face. “You’re not explaining anything.”
“You don’t need us to explain anything to you,” Trey muttered. “You’re clever enough to know it all already. You just don’t want to see it. If you want proof, then just look at the cave walls.”
“I don’t see anything except rocks and… oh yeah, rocks.”
“Try not to look. Then you’ll see.”
I opened my mouth to say that made no sense, but I swallowed the retort as I realized Trey was right. When I tried to study his face for a sign this was all some cruel joke, slivers of sickly light pulsed through the rocks in the places where my eyes couldn’t focus. Long veins of that otherworldly substance I’d seen in my dreams wove through the stone, projecting a sliver of light in a color that didn’t seem to match anything on our spectrum.
Yeah, okay. That’s weird. The cold is making me hallucinate.
I dug around inside myself, storing all this nonsense about star-killing deities and shadow children in the section of my brain reserved for stuff about Derleth that didn’t make sense (it was a large swath of real estate, rapidly expanding), and pulled strength from some nebulous place inside me so we could continue. I grabbed Quinn’s arm and let him pull me to my feet. Down, down, down we climbed. Each step on the rock jolted through my body. The temperature dropped so low that even with Quinn’s jacket tight around my shoulders, my whole body trembled. The cold rattled in my chest, and I kept slipping on the rocks as my depth perception wavered. The mineral veins pulsed along the walls, disappearing every time I tried to focus on them.
I pressed my fingers into the scar on my wrist and tried to think of warm things – hot chocolate, pumpkin soup, a blazing fire…
The guys slipped down a rock shelf and stopped on the edge of a body of water. While Trey rolled up his school slacks, Quinn hoisted me onto his shoulders. The three of them splashed along the edge of a dark pool of unseen depth. I could tell from the movement of air that we were in some large cavern. The flickering light of Trey’s lantern was swallowed by the stygian gloom.
On the other side of the pool, Quinn set me down. Trey and Ayaz moved further up the slope, grunting as they pushed at a large slab of rock covered with an etching of lines and dots that were definitely not caused by dripping water. Quinn turned to me, tucking a strand of my short hair behind my ear.
“You’ll find your answers on the other side of that rock.” He flashed me his Quinn smile, but it was all lopsided and forced. “I hope you’re ready for this, Hazy.”
I could barely get any words out, my teeth were chattering so badly. “Why are we in these caves? Why couldn’t I get answers back in your room, where it’swarm?”
“You want to go back to my room?” Quinn cocked an eyebrow.
“I’d slap you if I could move my arms,” I muttered.
Quinn swept an arm over his head, indicating the cavern. “There are caves like this all through the peninsula. We’ve been exploring them for twenty years, and we’re barely scratched the surface of what’s down here. We’re about to walk to one of Parris’ caves – it leads directly under the gym.”
I didn’t think it was possible for my body to feel even colder, but at the mention of the gym, a bitter chill ran up my spine.
Trey ran back to us, holding up the lantern so I could see his face and clothes streaked with filth, less King of the school and more unfathomable creature of the deep. He held out his dirt-streaked hand.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “On the other side of this rock are your answers, but it could also be your doom.”
