I remembered Quinn at that party a few weeks ago, watching me scarf down potato chips and remarking about how cool it was to see a girl eat food with gusto. I knew he wasn’t being serious. Quinn Delacorte was never serious, not even when he was trying to convince me he was some kind of zombie revenant eskimo. My skin still burned where he had touched me. My whole body was both ice and fire – confused, just like me.How in the frigid cold of this cave and the horror of what I’d already uncovered did these guys still make my blood run hot?
We walked along a wide tunnel, the ground mostly even and the walls hewn smooth –toosmooth, like shimmering glass. I caught glimpses of more veins in the walls, crossing each other in a lattice. Each step fell heavy as we walked into darkness – the kind of darkness that had form and mass, that pushed back against you as you stumbled into it, oppressive and tangible.
The tunnel widened, and we stood on the edge of a vast cavern – ten, twenty, fifty times the size of the last. Only instead of being a natural cavern formed by the movement of water, this had been wrested from nature and turned into the kind of cyclopean architectural statement someone like Dracula would appreciate. Everything wastoosmooth,tooperfect; the angles seemed to bend and shift in the flickering light of a series of candles in niches spaced around the walls. The fires barely penetrated the vast space, but illuminated small sections of the shimmering stone walls and the eerie veins that arced and crossed to form a delicate and decidedly too-regular pattern through the dome.
In the center stood a wooden structure flanked by glowing torches and strung with a scaffold and ropes. It looked a little like a gallows. I could just make out the edges of a trapdoor in the floor of the platform. The lock clattered, as if something pushed up against it from beneath. A cloak of dread shrouded the space – a creeping sensation that crawled over my skin the longer I looked at that trapdoor.
“This is impossible,” I breathed.
“If you’re referring to the structural integrity of the cavern,” Ayaz said. “I can assure you it’s stood for at least five hundred years.”
“Thanks for the architecture lecture, Mr. van der Rohe. I meant that I’ve dreamed about this place.”
“We all have, at one time or another,” Trey said. “That’s why it always feels familiar.”
I turned to him in confusion. “You mean… everyone in this school?”
“Everyone on the planet,” Trey corrected. I didn’t expect that. “This place is… it’s sort of part of our collective subconscious.”
I jabbed a finger at the structure. “If you thought this would give me answers, you were mistaken.”
“Answers are coming.” Quinn dragged me back into an alcove. “I can hear their footsteps right now.”
“What footsteps—”
“Sssssh!”
Trey clamped a hand over my mouth. I sagged back against him, too exhausted and cold to fight. The four of us huddled together in a large niche, backs pressed against the shimmering stone. The wall pulsated against my skin, giving off a mild warmth that was both comforting and unsettling. From here, we could see clearly across the floor of the cavern, but it would be unlikely anyone else would see us in the shadows.
Unless they didn’t see with human eyes.
My ears pricked at a faint sound – shoes thudding on stone, coming from another tunnel on the opposite side. There was a drumming sound, too – a percussion that seemed to form a perfect slow march, but as soon as I tried to catch the beat, it would slip away into something else.
A shadow flickered in front of the torches, then another. Dark shapes circled the room, chanting in low voices – words I did not understand. They stamped their feet on the ground in a furious beat that felt ancient and primal and also familiar – their voices rising and falling in a sublime and discordant harmony. Behind my back, the wall pulsed along with the beat.
Their song sent cold shivers through my already frozen veins.
One of the shadows stepped forward, climbing up onto the central dais, dragging a dark shape behind it like a lump of old meat. At first, I thought it was one of the things that had chased me in the gym, but under the torchlight I could see it was a human wearing a dark cloak.
The figure raised a hand and called forth two others, who climbed up on the platform beside it. Chains dragged across the wood as they unshackled something.
With a heave, they unbolted the trapdoor and lifted the lid.
Hatred poured out.
Chapter Three
All my life I lived in a place where hatred was baked into bone. The color of your skin, the people you called friends, the life you were born into and couldn’t escape – all these things painted a target on your back that attracted malevolence like flies to shit. Those on the outside hated because they were afraid that if they didn’t separate themselves from us then they would become one of us. But that was nothing on the cruelties we could visit on each other in the name of wringing out the tiniest shred of power.
Hatred burrowed into my thoughts and lived close to my heart, so trust me when I say that what poured out of that trapdoor was every ignorant abhorrence, every vicious deed, every revolting thought that had ever been visited upon a human. An avalanche of misery rolled across the cavern and crashed into me, tossing me outside of my body and sending me reeling from the dizzying spectacle of its spite.
The hatred crawled across my consciousness, forcing me to confront memories and possibilities that were more monstrous than the unknown. It grasped me close, feeding me with ineffable loneliness and the shuddering terror it couldn’t help but invoke. And in that terror Iknew.
I knew that everything the guys had hinted at was true.
Theywereall dead. Dead but walking. Kept alive somehow by thisthingthat Parris had called from the deep, this thing that fed on their hatred, and grew fat and rich off their evil deeds and dark thoughts, biding its time until it was strong enough to… to…
To escape.
