Feral (19 page)

“What was the draw?” Claire asked, sifting through the old news stories she'd printed from the microfilm reader. “Why did you want to write about this, Serena?”

Shivering in the constant stream of cold air that poured from her broken balcony door, Claire glanced up at the dresser scarf lying in a heap in the middle of the dresser. She still hadn't straightened the material out—it was every bit as bunched and crooked as it had been the moment she'd first stepped inside during the night of her arrival. But maybe, Claire had started to think, some things really were like that—they never did get straightened out. Sometimes, bruises never got a chance to heal. Serena's didn't, anyway.

Accidental
, Sheriff Holman had said. But the word didn't sit right. Especially now that Claire had a better idea of who Sheriff Holman really was.

Claire rubbed her eyes. “There had to be a reason. Did you see something? Did you
think
you saw something?”

She sighed. “Why did you need to stay after school? You could have drafted your story anywhere. Why would you risk staying? Why—?” She felt the blood race out of her face as she remembered the angry words Becca had shouted at Rich in the street during the ice storm:
Someone needed to look in the basement.
That's why Becca'd been so angry.

Claire picked up a printout, staring at a news photo of the front hall of Peculiar High, crime scene tape stretched in front of the basement door. “Someone needs to look in the basement,” she said aloud.

“Maybe I do, too,” Claire added, gathering her papers together just as her father began to call her down to dinner.

She arrived at school twenty minutes early the next morning, only to find the front hallway had been invaded by the marching band—most likely an attempt to escape the persistent, bitter cold.

Claire eyed the door beside the front office marked Faculty Only. She wanted to see the basement for herself in peace. But the band director was a tall man who shouted at the tuba section, “Pep! More pep!” in a gravelly voice and stared at Claire with what she interpreted to be suspicious eyes. She didn't need him reporting her curiosity to the main office, so that a secretary would come out jingling a set of master keys to lock the basement up, eliminating the possibility of the new kid getting a chance to look around.

Feigning complete disinterest in the basement door, she took her time sauntering down the front hall. Turning the corner, she found the cheerleaders in the midst of their own early rehearsal, filling the side corridor with the sounds of their clapping hands and their voices shouting cheers in unison.

Becca was in the middle of the group, wearing a Peculiar High sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Her eyes settled on Claire's face as she rustled her pom-poms just before sliding into the splits.

Claire nodded a polite hello and quickly veered around the cheerleaders, heading upstairs to her own locker. She hung her trench on the hook inside, working to cram the shoulders and tuck the tail into the tiny space, and slowly began to make her way back, hoping the band had left the front hall.

Back in the side corridor, though, the cheerleaders had apparently just wrapped up; the squad was breaking apart when Claire rounded the corner, the girls all sprinting for the bathroom to change for class. Becca waved, an awkward smile on her face.

Claire waved back and tried to scoot past her, but Becca jumped in front of her path.

“So,” Becca began. “You're going to the dance with Rich.”

Claire forced a smile. “I don't think I'll ever get used to the speed of small-town news,” she admitted.

“Do you know what you're going to wear?” Becca asked excitedly.

Claire flinched against Becca's enthusiasm.

“I'd be happy to take you shopping this weekend,” Becca offered quickly. “In Kansas City. Where we—where I—got my own dress. I know some good places.”

“I have something,” Claire blurted. She hadn't expected Becca to pounce so quickly on her promise to be a better friend the second time around. And she didn't want to endure the horrors of a dress shop changing room with someone who would have to be told the entire gruesome story of the pink scars that made Claire's skin look like a road map.

Becca tilted her head. “Probably way better than anything you could buy around here, anyway,” she said. “I'm sure you're going to look really beautiful.”

Judging by the syrupy tones in her voice, it was exactly the kind of thing Becca felt she should have said to Serena.

The word made Claire flinch, though.
Beautiful.
It made her feel unbalanced. She cleared her throat, straightened herself. “Gotta get to journalism,” she lied. “Talk to you later,” she promised.

As she edged away, disappearing into the gathering throng, Claire realized the only way to slip into the basement unseen was if she were surrounded by a crowd. She needed the bustle of classes changing. A distraction.

The dismissal to lunch would be perfect.

That afternoon, as the talking, shouting, laughing hordes made their way toward the cafeteria, Claire drifted toward the cool wall along the front hall, gripped the “Faculty Only” door handle, and twisted. While the crowds were paying attention only to each other—to their friends and their plans and their small-town gossip, Claire slipped behind the door.

Mind spinning, Claire hurried down the stairs. The hallway bleeding out from the bottom step was dimly lit. The basement had been closed up so long, it smelled empty—sour, like the inside of an unused refrigerator.

Claire poked her head through the first open doorway. To her left, she found shelves packed with half-opened containers of soaps and bleaches, stained squeegees and sponges, and racks of paper products for the bathrooms. Mops stood in old buckets. A large, battered, wooden teacher's desk stood near a small group of metal lockers; here, heat trailed from the boiler, as uncomfortable as a thick wool blanket on a summer night. As she glanced about, she noticed a faded Janitors sign glued to the door.

One of the lockers by the desk looked tortured; its warped door stood open a few inches. It hung funny, promising never to shut completely again—or to never open if the door ever happened to be forced shut.

A cold breeze circled the room, pushing the heat aside and hitting Claire's sweaty skin in a way that made her shiver. She jumped against a sudden thud; her breath became ragged as she began to raise her arms, as though to guard her face. With another brutally cold gust, a crooked venetian blind bowed out, then slammed against an open window near the ceiling.

“Stop it,” she scolded her racing heart. “Just stop it,” she said as she walked across the floor, feeling a need to push the window shut. But the ground-level window was up near the ceiling of the office. She had to climb up onto the old wooden desk in order to reach it. She grabbed hold of the latch, pushed it down.

Turning back around, she noticed the desk beneath her feet was covered in dust, with strange swipes through it—like someone had hurriedly knocked some of the dust off with their hand. She swore she could see long slender stripes—swirling marks from four fingers.

There was something so weird about the room—an off-kilter feeling that made her back out quickly. She raced into the hallway, turned one corner, then another, hurrying past classroom doors, not even sure, at this point, what she was really looking for.

She paused in the center of a corridor, listening to the muffled sounds of Peculiar High above her. Foot traffic, metallic thuds of locker doors, voices calling to friends, laughter, teachers barking at students, “Come on, hurry up. No dawdling in the hallway. Get to the cafeteria”—all of it seemed miles away. She felt buried deep beneath the earth's surface.

Claire glanced over her shoulder once, then again. But she felt so bare—uncovered—vulnerable as she stood in the corridor. All the open classroom doors began to seem like eyes, staring.

She darted through one of the doors, pulse pounding out a prayer that the room would feel safer, like a hiding spot.
Just for a minute
, she promised herself.
Just until I get rid of this odd feeling of being watched.
She found herself inside a sprawling old gymnasium, being used as some sort of storage facility. Wooden bleachers had been pushed back against the far wall, and the gym was crammed with broken desks and tables. Buckets of half-used roofing tar, brooms, moldy mops, and even an old push mower drew her attention. Spiderwebs caught the light near the windows along the ceiling. At the back of the gym, a metal bar had been fed through the door handles of the exit, then chained into place, giving the room a prison-like feel.

All the scooting in and out of furniture and floor waxers had destroyed the court, now missing so much paint that it looked like an eraser had been taken to the floor. A scraggly-looking net dangled from a gray, faded basketball backboard. Along the ceiling hung dirty remnants of state championship banners.

Claire frowned at the school history that seemed to be rotting away, instead of on display, proudly. Pictures of girls' basketball teams hung in a line near the entrance, as did blowups of one particular athlete—a gorgeous girl, blond hair—number 21, Jennifer Isles. Top scorer.

“Isles,” Claire repeated, taking a step closer. She squinted at the picture of her history teacher. A former Peculiar High student herself. Today, Isles looked exactly like she had in high school—maybe a bit more polished. But not any older. Those photos, Claire told herself, couldn't have been taken that long ago. Somehow, though, in the midst of the dusty gym, those pictures, those basketball wins seemed like ancient history.

Glancing at the piles of discarded equipment, Claire began to think the gym looked untamed, overgrown—like all the scrub brush that surrounded the town. It looked like an enormous hiding place. But not for her. For someone else. Someone lying in wait.

Last time, they waited right out in the open, on the stairs, but wouldn't it be more fun for them if this time they could jump out at me, like kids playing a twisted game of hide-and-seek, before grabbing me, throwing me to the ground?

The distance between Claire and the memory of her attack began to shrink. There it was, this thing that Claire had shoved into a rearview mirror, only to finally glance at the printing along the bottom of the glass:
Objects closer than they appear . . .

Hurrying out into the hallway, she paused by a sign labeled Boys' Locker Room.

“Casey,” she mumbled. Remembering the story of Sanders's injuries and Casey's own sad, brutal death, she sucked in a breath and took a hesitant step forward. “Come on, Cain,” she told herself. “You want to know what Serena was investigating, right? This is it—the boy in the basement. The urban legend. You wanted to see for yourself, so
go see for yourself.
”

The locker room was as still as death. The lockers stood empty. The benches had grown a thick layer of dust. The showers on the opposite side of the room had not dripped, she thought, in years.

Evidence of Casey's paint bomb was still everywhere, nearly a decade after his prank. Wild, pink sprays of paint were splashed across the walls; splatter marks trailed across the lockers, the benches.

The longer Claire stood, though, the more those splotches began to look like a spray of blood—began to look more like evidence and stains left by Casey's suicide.

Her head swam; glancing about, Claire found a bright pink handprint on the wall just behind her, under the light switch, looking desperate and afraid. That handprint looked so fresh, Claire swore it was pleading with her to come closer, to help.

Claire ducked back out of the locker room and into the hallway. This was a bad idea, she scolded herself. Incredibly bad.

But her eyes immediately landed on the door to the gym, and she remembered the piles of discarded junk, the hiding places—and her ears filled with taunting laughter coming toward her, all of it male. Tinged with the anticipation of an attack. They were back. They were after her again. She needed to get out of there, out of the basement.
Now.

She walked faster, trying to find her way back to the stairs. But Claire was turned around. She was alone, in a labyrinth. Her chest felt suddenly too small for her heart. She was lost.

“Wrong turn,” she grumbled, panic starting to swell. But she suddenly felt as though
all
her turns had been wrong.

Pipes along the ceiling began to unleash a strange vapor, filling the entirety of the corridor with a kind of mist that was not unlike the fog that had surrounded the old Sims place—or the edges of the Peculiar High parking lot—for days. The same kind of fog that had filled the alleyway back in Chicago, during last spring's final icing.

Her breath, now quick, streamed out in frozen clouds. Her cheeks burned against a sudden bitter wind. Her ears popped with the sound of ice-laden branches striking each other.

Claire turned once more—and found herself not in another hallway, but an alley with cracked pavement and a dark sky. Stars glittered above. She gasped as she inched forward, the soles of her shoes sliding against the thin skin of ice beneath her. Shadows lengthened, spilling out from streetlights and bare trees. Freezing rain crackled against buildings and tree limbs. When Claire lifted her face, she felt the prickle of sleet against her cheeks.

She wasn't inside Peculiar High anymore—she was outside. At night. During an ice storm.

Footsteps thundered behind her—hurried, forceful, angry. She sped up. So did they.

She glanced nervously over her shoulder. Behind her—a man's silhouette. “Hello?” she said, her head still pointed behind her, feet still moving. If she talked to him, she thought—if she showed him that she knew he was there, maybe that might discourage him. Maybe, if she just kept walking, but didn't run like she really wanted to, maybe that was a little like standing her ground while trying to get away all at the same time. It was a flimsy plan, she knew—but all she had.