Friday Nightmares Page 6

  I didn’t know what to say to this. I didn’t know what to say because I knew he was right. This was madness, sheer madness.

  But still… I couldn’t just give this thing up. I couldn’t just let my father’s death have been in vain. Despite our differences, he was still blood. It wasn’t just about losing my magic anymore, even though that was important too.

  It was about justice. And justice had to be served.

  I had a lot to think about. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to think about it all, even if I had unlimited time to do so.

  The fact that I had exactly the opposite only made everything that much worse.

  Five

  The Beast And Its Belly

  The way I saw it, there was only one place I could go from here. Only one place where it made any sense to go. And that was to the belly of the beast: the museum itself.

  But first, I’d have to craft the cloaking spell that my father had intended to make.

  Crafting a long-term effect spell onto an orb was hard work. You needed an empty orb, and a magic word, and an intended effect. Getting the orb wasn’t the hard part; my father had left me dozens of them, more than I’d probably ever need. The magic word I had decided upon wasn’t difficult to say, either. That was “pallium.”

  The tricky part was thinking of the intended effect. You really had to think in order to Craft your own spell from scratch, whether into an orb or otherwise. Like, so hard that it felt like the thought was about ready to explode from the top of your head. Anything less and the imprint of the spell might not register, making the word about as useless as a spoon at a salad bar.

  Once activated, the sphere’s effects would last approximately two or three hours. During that time, I would pass as whichever disguise I put my mind to assuming. Powerful stuff, and very dangerous if fallen into the wrong hands.

  I’d Crafted only two spells before. One was a good luck spell for an Algebra exam last year. The second was a spell meant to ward off those who intended Enisa harm- namely, bullies. That one had mixed results. Crafting was some pretty advanced magic, and I’d need all of the concentration I had to perform it.

  “Pallium,” I whispered, tapping the orb with my finger later on that night. “Pallium.” I thought of the cloaking spell, and how I was planning to pass as a reporter, and how much information I’d gather while doing so.

  “Pallium.” It’d been half an hour of this now, sitting at my desk in my bedroom while Rusty dozed off in his pug nest. “Pallium.” Half an hour of mind-numbing repetition and thinking so hard that I’d given myself a near-migraine. “Pallium.”

  Sinister workings were afoot. I could feel something foul hanging in the air. Or maybe it was just negative residue from reading about the gruesome way the museum employee had been killed. I could picture the scenes right in my head, the same way I always saw how my dad looked when he was found that chilly early September day. Bled to death after being attacked by an “unknown party,” as the Boston Globe had put it.

  I had a sick, sinking feeling that the party was about to make themselves known soon enough.

  I looked around at my bedroom and felt paranoid. Everything appeared normal enough- as normal as things appeared during the midnight hour, anyway. My lava lamp was casting star-and-moon shapes all around me. Tacked up onto my walls and closet doors were posters of bands and TV shows I liked. My bookshelves were full and spilling over onto the floor. The two windows in the rear of my room were covered up by blinds, and I was almost afraid to even so much as peek out of them on this night.

  Yep, painfully normal.

  But my dad’s day had been pretty normal, too… until it was violated in a most bloody and brutal way.

  I returned to the work of Crafting my cloaking spell, tapping the orb and focusing all my energy on the job at hand. “Pallium,” I said, one last time. A spark that eased out from the tip of my finger. The spark transferred my magic into the orb, filling it with a translucent, milky glow.

  I pulled away from my desk and wandered over to my bed, peeling back the cool covers and preparing for sleep.

  After school tomorrow, I would infiltrate the museum.

  And for that, I would need every ounce of magic I could muster.

  ~&~

  There was no spell in the world that could save me from my own lateness, so I left Rusty slumbering soundly and all but ran through the morning motions. I peeled into the school parking lot at eight o’clock on-the-nose and dashed into the building, quicker than magic.

  To say that Dunwich High looked unusual for a school was the understatement of the century. With its stained-glass windows, its gray bricks, and its towering spires, it looked more like a gothic castle than a school, the kind where innocent maidens fell in love with cursed beasts. Maybe it was an actual gothic castle, at some point, but its brooding inhabitants had decided to turn their talents into founding an expensive academic institution instead.

  It was thanks to the Candle wizard trust that I was going to the same school that countless other Candle wizards had for generations. I was the last one alive to carry on the tradition of bringing magic to an institution that was otherwise empty of it. If I didn’t walk those halls, no wizard would.

  The Candle wizards were far from the only family legacy in Dunwich. The school ran red with the blood of New England royalty: senators’ sons, CEOs’ daughters, lawyers’ hellspawn. They were the future leaders of America and I was the future nobody. Being a magic wizard, after all, didn’t pay nearly as much as being a legal one.

  Roughly 1,500 students attended Dunwich, and the hallways were nowhere near wide enough to accommodate them all. I pushed through the crowds and past the main office on my way to the locker, doing my best to ignore the shiny-eyed apparition hanging from the rafters with a noose tied around its neck. I was the only one who could actually see it, but its presence would be felt by the student body in far more subtle ways: a spine-tingling chill as they passed underneath it, maybe, or a nightmare later on as the apparition burrowed itself deep into their unconscious psyche.

  Dunwich High had been around since the mid-19th century and — like most old New England buildings — it's collected its fair share of the restless dead along the way. I had exorcised over two dozen ghosts, phantoms, spooks, and poltergeists since the beginning of Freshman year. Most of them had either died on the property or died elsewhere and found themselves trapped because of unfinished school-related business.

  I thought of them more as clients rather than enemies. Four years of high school was bad enough. An eternity? Actual hell was preferable to that. I was doing them a favor by banishing them, whether they realized it or not.

  Ghosts weren’t the only monsters haunting Dunwich. The school had plenty of flesh-and-blood demons, too, the kind that wore varsity jackets and Pom-Poms and couldn’t be banished. When it came to those demons, I was usually more the hunted than the hunter.

  I pulled up into my usual parking spot, exited my car and made my way into the school. Enisa’s locker was our morning meeting spot. We had chosen it at the start of the year because it was halfway between my first-period History class and Frankie’s Spanish class. I was almost there when I heard a loud, shrill scream that was much too close for comfort.

  What the hell?

  Two big, beefy boys came sprinting down the hall, their footfalls heavy as they pushed confused students aside in their mad rush to escape the source of the scream. I recognized them as they flew by: Eric and Ivan Fisher, also known as the twins. Both of their faces were twisted in laughter, which was never good. Laughter from those two only came after a catastrophe- and usually for those they felt were less than them.

  I shoved through the people as I made my way over to Enisa’s locker, where the commotion seemed to be centered. The crowd grew thicker until I reached her locker and realized with a sinking heart that it was the source of the commotion.

  “Dispersio,” I muttered, waving my hand in the air. The people around me wandere
d away, revealing Enisa frowning into her locker as trails of tears slowly dripped down her cheeks. She wasn’t hurt in a physical way, but the sadness in her wide, brown eyes spoke of hurt of a different kind.

  “Enisa,” I said, pulling her in close and hugging her tightly. “What happened?”

  “It was the Fischer twins,” she gasped, burying her face into my shoulder. “Sophie, too. Look what they put on my locker.”

  I felt a rush of red-hot fury come over me like a wave as I pieced together what had happened. The cruelty. The intolerance. The injustice. It was nothing new for Enisa, but it still hurt just as badly to know that she had so much trouble getting it to stop.

  She turned away from me and shut the locker door, so I could see. I instantly wished I hadn’t. A terrible, dirty, hateful word had been painted there, its letters bleeding down onto the floor. It was a word that had haunted Enisa ever since she and her family moved here from Lebanon back in third grade.

  A word whose meaning I had never truly known until I saw how other people treated her.

  TERRORIST.

  There was no other which could possibly be farther from Enisa, who had never sowed a single seed of terror a day in her life. They might as well have been calling her a reptile or a vampire. And yet they used it repeatedly as if the label described her the way hot described the sun.

  It was they who were the terrorists, not her. It was they who spread hatred wherever they went. It was they who used fear to prove their sick agendas.

  And I wasn’t going to stand for it anymore.

  “Dammit,” I said, clenching my fists. “I’m going to get them back for this, Enisa. Trust me. They’ll never know what hit them.”

  “No,” Enisa said, grabbing my arm as I turned to walk away. “You can’t. What if they do figure out what hit them? And they connect the dots and discover you’re a wizard?”

  “Not likely.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. Let’s say I cast a spell to make the Fisher twins wake up and find their beds full of cockroaches. Do you really think the first things running through their heads is going to be ‘gee, I bet that Henry kid had something to do with it –“

  “Probably not, no. But it’s only a matter of time before someone sees you casting a spell and begins to suspect something. Sophie Crane lost all her hair last year because of that meme she made about me going back to Lebanon, and I swear she made some sort of connection.”

  “But she didn’t have any proof that I had anything to do with it.”

  “No, but one time is all it takes to start a rumor.”

  “I can be more discreet about it this time. Maybe I can make the Fisher twins croak like toads whenever they open their mouths. Or maybe I can give them genital warts. Or maybe-”

  “No,” she repeated, voice firm. “This isn’t The Craft. The only thing revenge will do is risk exposing your magic and get you in trouble with that Council of — whatever they are. We need to show them that we’re stronger than their hatred. That’s the best revenge we can ever have.”

  I knew she wanted me to say I would turn the other cheek forever and pretend none of it was happening, but that just wasn’t me.

  That’s what made it so hard not to rise to Enisa’s defense with every ounce of magical power I could muster. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it. But she also didn’t deserve someone bossing her around and telling her how to deal with her own issues. She was a strong girl and didn’t need anybody else to be strong for her. I wanted to respect her wishes, somehow, while still protecting her.

  “Fine,” I said. “I won’t seek fiery vengeance this time. But if it happens again… well, I can’t promise everyone involved will walk away with all their fingers and toes.”

  She had just opened her mouth to respond when Frankie came running around the corner like a bat out of hell, face flushed and eyes wide with the unmistakable look of panic. He was famous for his overreactions — like that time when My Chemical Romance broke up and he said it was the worst thing that’s happened to our country since 9/11 —but this one seemed genuine. He didn’t even pause to examine what was in her locker or comment about the lingering smoke.

  Was there another disaster brewing in our midst?

  “Henry. Enisa. We’ve got to get to the library and quick,” he exclaimed, resting his hands on his knees and gasping for air. “There’s trouble.”

  “More trouble? Already?” I said. “It’s not even first period.”

  “What happened?” asked Enisa.

  “It’s Miss Delaney. I went in to see if she had any candy and she shouted for me to get you. I don’t know what’s going on, but she looked pretty freaked.”

  I knew I should’ve stopped at Starbucks on the way to school. Better caffeinated and late than early and not, I always said — and it was already shaping up to be one hell of a morning.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go. Time to get our morning exorcise in.”

  ~&~

  The late bell rang just as we reached the library. Though I wasn’t exactly sad about missing History, I also didn’t want to push it too much this early in the year. Last year, we cut so many classes that we all ended up in DISS — Dunwich In-School Suspension — at least twice. The teachers and principals blamed our lack of attendance on our status as outcasts, and there we let it sit.

  I opened the doors to the library, ignoring the hastily-scrawled “CLOSED” sign taped upon them. We charged inside to find the lights out and the entire place empty aside from the librarian Miss Delaney, who was cowering on her knees behind the front desk.

  “Children?” she said, her voice barely even a whimper. “Oh, thank goodness it’s you, Henry. Something weird is happening.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you called me,” I said, hurrying over to her side to help her to her feet. “Can you describe exactly what’s going on?”

  “I’ll try my best,” she replied. “But I can’t promise it will be exact. Nothing ever is, when it comes to the supernatural.”

  Miss Meredith Delaney was a walking paradox. She had the outward appearance of Maya Angelou and the personality of a heavyweight boxer. Nothing slid by without her notice: not a talking student, not an overdue book, and definitely not a supernatural entity wreaking havoc on her peaceful literary sanctuary.

  We helped her over to a nearby table and sat her down. She wasn’t injured, but her legs were wobbly and her gait uncertain. She was positively spooked, to say the least, her eyes wide and gaze darting about the room. I’d never seen her like this. What could possibly have gotten into her?

  “I just arrived and was getting ready for the day when I heard a noise coming from the back of the library, right around the young adult section,” she explained. “Like a clattering, almost, as if a stack of books had fallen. Wouldn't be the first time. I went to see what it was and- well.”

  “Well?” prompted Enisa.

  “I feel crazy just thinking about it. There was this tall… man. Standing there, between the aisles. He was wearing a long black coat and a brimmed hat, which cast a shadow so wide that I couldn’t see his face. Maybe he didn’t even have one.”

  I looked back at Frankie and Enisa for help and ideas, but they were just as baffled as I was.

  “What makes you so sure this was supernatural?” I asked.

  “Because of the way he felt. He was just wrong, like he didn't belong there and never would. I knew it the same way I knew you were a wizard, Henry, the very first time we met.”

  Miss Delaney was the only adult in the school who knew the truth about what I was. That’s because she herself was clairvoyant, gifted with the power to read auras and glimpse into the future. I discovered her secret abilities the very first day of high school, when I walked into the library in search of books and she asked me if I was a wizard. I told her yes, because my own (almost) psychic senses told me I could trust a fellow bookworm, and the rest was history.

  “What h
appened next?” Enisa asked her. “After you first saw the man.”

  “The world around me went dark. Pitch dark. It was like someone had turned off the lights, even the morning sun itself. I froze right where I stood, so scared I could hardly even make even a single sound. I prayed to God to save me from whatever it was. And then this man- this creature- it… smiled at me.”

  “It smiled?” Frankie repeated. “Gross. Was it like a… ‘chopping up bodies’ smile or an ‘I love school libraries’ smile?”

  “More like a grin,” said Miss Delaney. “The widest, wickedest grin I've ever seen. Part of me wanted to say something — to figure out what he wanted, what he was doing there, or why he had chosen to reveal himself to me — but I didn’t get a chance to ask. I closed my eyes for a second and when I opened them up again, he was gone.”

  “I’ve never heard of this kind of Darkon before,” I said. “I’m not an expert on evil entities — not like my dad was — but I have read about many of them. Could you show me where he was? I might be able to pick up something if I'm standing at the same spot.”

  “He was right back there,” she said, pointing a shaking finger toward the YA section. “Next to that Goosebumps display. The big ghost. You see?”

  “I see,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let’s go check it out.”

  There’d been something lurking in the back of the dark, empty old school library, all right. I could sense its magical residue as I approached with Frankie and Enisa at my back, their fingers barely touching each of my shoulders. It was a great and inescapable feeling of emptiness like I had fallen into a pit of despair and would never be able to claw my way out of it. I felt it like a great weight chained to my soul, sinking it into the depths of the Earth.

  I closed my eyes and focused, drawing the energy to me, feeling it out. The only thing I got — clear and bright as day — was a grin. The whitest grin I’ve ever imagined, one so wide that no human being could ever produce it. I opened my eyes and the thing seemed to appear for a second; that grin burned into my retinas.