Unable to tolerate the chaos of the pile, Trey immediately set about organizing. He pulled out the newspaper articles about the fire and set them aside. “We already know everything we need to know about this.”
Trey’s description of the fire and of digging his way out of his own grave still burned fresh in my mind. The articles couldn’t tell me anything his recollection wouldn’t. Trey made separate piles of the Rebecca Nurse genealogy and the occult stuff. He bit his lower lip as he sifted through the pile, and his shoulders relaxed. He enjoyed putting everything in order.
As I sorted the papers onto Trey’s neat stacks, I picked up a page I hadn’t noticed before. It contained lines of symbols made of lines and triangles. They looked like the imprints of chicken feet walking across the paper. The symbols formed three columns down the page and were scrawled on both sides of the paper, and several sets were crossed out or circled, or had question-marks or notes in another language (possibly Latin) written next to them. At the top of the page, Zehra had added a Post-it note.
“Stolen from Ms. W office. ???”
“Does this mean anything to you?” I handed the paper to Trey. “She must’ve taken it before she left Derleth.”
Trey took the paper, frowning as he ran his hand down the page, his full lips pursing as he whispered unknown words under his breath. His muscles twitched, nostrils flaring.
“Trey?”
He curled his fingers into a fist and slammed it into a cupboard door. Wood splintered, and I ducked, covering my head as cups clattered to the floor around us.
“Fuck. What did you do that for?”
Trey shoved the paper in my face. “Do you know what this is?”
“No. Duh. That’s why I asked you.”
Trey’s face was white. I’d never seen him look so… out of control, like there was all this rage inside him and it had nowhere to be. “It’s proof of exactly what I suspected. It’s a code commonly used in the Eldritch Club – cuneiform, an ancient Mesopotamian script that’s common among practitioners of magic. We can all read it.”
“So it’s a spell? Or like, minutes for a club meeting?” I put on a snooty English accent. “‘Jeeves, we’re out of fifty-year-old Scotch.’”
Trey looked at me like I was insane. “I thought I’d get a break from Quinn, but apparently, he’s rubbed off on you. It’s a list. A list of all the students of Miskatonic Prep.” Trey slammed his fist into another cabinet door.“Fuck.”
I snatched the paper out of his hands before he could destroy it. “Okay, so it’s like a class roll or something? I’m not sure exactly what that proves—”
“Thisis the minutes from an Eldritch Club meeting. It’s dated four years before the fire, the year before my dad enrolled me in Miskatonic Prep.” Trey’s whole body trembled with rage. “Every powerful family in the country has contributed a child to this list.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the fire wasn’t an accident. They planned exactly when it would be, and exactly which students would be killed that night.” Trey’s eyes blazed. “Our families chose us to be sacrificed.”
Chapter Ten
Fuck.
Well, that’s dark.
I mean, I wasn’t surprised. I’d believe anything of Vincent and his Eldritch Club cronies. I’d certainly believe it of Ms. West and her Dr. Frankenstein lab.
Even though Trey had suspected for some time, seeing proof of what his parents, all the parents, had done wiped him out completely. He punched a few more cupboards and then collapsed on the bed, a dishtowel wrapped around his bleeding fist.
I let him be. That was some heavy shit to deal with, even in the context of the shit that Miskatonic Prep had thrown at us. I finished sorting and reading through all of Zehra’s material, but nothing was as damning as that page of names. My stomach growled, so I pulled some ramen out of the backpack and found two bowls Trey hadn’t broken – a dinner fit for a King.
After we’d eaten we lay side-by-side on Zehra’s narrow bed – the bed where we’d had frantic, desperate sex only a few hours earlier – and Trey held up the paper and turned it over and over, the tension in his shoulders growing with every rotation.
Eventually, I snatched it off him. He tried to explain what each symbol meant, how the different chicken’s feet represented sounds and how they could be used to represent modern names – like Quinn, Courtney, Tillie. He pointed to his own name, right at the top of the list, as if his father couldn’t wait to get rid of him.
My palms itched to melt Vincent Bloomberg’s smug face.I should have incinerated that bastard while I had the chance.
Trey and I slept cradled in each other’s arms. Well, Trey slept, his body shuddering as he settled into a string of violent nightmares. I held him tight, bracing his body against the onslaught, and stared at the ceiling. The light was still on in the RV, but I couldn’t bear the thought of shifting Trey’s weight to get up and turn it off. Moths battered themselves against the windows, desperate to get inside to worship their faux sun god.
As soon as the real sun peeked over the horizon, I shook Trey awake. We gathered up Zehra’s research and all the candy bars and condoms we could find into the backpack I’d started yesterday, then stole out of the RV and walked into Arkham. Trey kept a lookout while I hotwired a car and drove us to the state line. We dumped the car, changed our clothes again (stopping at a nondescript thrift store for something to fit Trey), and got on a bus that would take us back across the state in the opposite direction to a small town about forty miles from Arkham, where this Deborah woman lived.
Thankfully, the bus was mostly empty. We found a seat at the back. Trey dropped the satchel at his feet. It made a loud clang as it hit the metal floor.
