Class Trip II

by Bebe Faas Rice

  “What have you done to her?” Hallie sobbed. “What have you turned her into? What kind of people are you, anyway?”

  Reverend Thoreson waved Sister Evans off with an elegant flutter of his hand.

  The car sputtered briefly and started off down the road. Slowly, sedately, as befitted the bearer of the next Fire Maiden.

  “Please don’t leave Becky in that church,” Hallie said again, shivering. “I know that you . . . you kill things in that church.”

  The vicar laughed mockingly. “In the first place we don’t call it a church. It’s our Place of Worship. There’s a difference, you see. And yes, we do kill things there, but they are only minor sacrifices. Fowl. Small woodland creatures. Things of that nature.”

  “Then why do you need Becky? Let us go, and we won’t tell a soul what goes on here. I promise!”

  Norman snickered in Hallie’s ear at that. He obviously found what she said amusing. The others must have, too, as a little ripple of laughter passed over the crowd.

  “But our small sacrifices aren’t satisfying The Goddess,” Reverend Thoreson said in a calm, reasonable tone. “Our harvests have been poor. Our women are not producing healthy offspring. The Goddess has made it clear she needs a human sacrifice for Beltane.”

  “Your harvests are probably poor because you’re farming the way people did three hundred years ago!” Hallie found she was shouting, so she lowered her voice, trying to sound reasonable. “Maybe the soil’s worn out. And maybe your women would produce healthy children if you had a doctor in town, instead of Mrs. Grigsby and her herbs!”

  “Yes, I’m sure you feel that way,” the vicar replied. “You Outsiders think you know everything, don’t you? But we here in Holyoake know the truth.”

  He turned to the villagers and asked, “Do you remember the last time? Our harvests? The sickly infants?”

  “Yes, yes,” they murmured, almost as if they were chanting in unison.

  “But Sister Evans gave her only child, Deborah, to The Goddess and saved us all,” called a woman in the rear of the crowd.

  “Sister Evans? The woman in the car just now? You mean she actually let you kill her own daughter?” cried Hallie. “I can’t believe it!”

  That poor, poor girl! How could anyone do that to their own flesh and blood? How could anyone do that to anyone?

  “Yes, Deborah Evans,” Reverend Thoreson said dreamily. “And The Goddess smiled on us once again. The harvests were plentiful. Healthy children were born.”

  “You’re crazy, all of you. Can’t you see? It was just a coincidence! Please don’t kill us. Our dying won’t change a thing!”

  Hallie was shouting now, but she didn’t care. She had to convince them. Surely they could see what a terrible mistake they were making!

  The vicar seemed to snap out of his reverie. “But why are we wasting time when there are so many things to do?”

  He beckoned to several of his followers. “Brother Norman’s truck is parked beyond that next bend. Please help escort our guests to it. We wouldn’t want them to make another pointless attempt at escape, would we?”

  The burly man removed his arm from Adam’s throat and threw Adam bodily over his shoulder as if he were carrying a sack of grain.

  Adam managed to raise his head and look at Hallie.

  “It’s no use, Hallie,” he croaked. “These people are all insane.”

  Norman pushed Hallie along before him, still holding her arms twisted cruelly behind her. “So you did have a car all along, Norman,” she said. “I figured you were lying.”

  Norman sneered. “You Outsiders are supposed to be so smart about modern things. You kids could have fixed your own car. There really wasn’t that much wrong with it . . . before I got my hands on it.”

  The bumpy ride in the back of Norman’s old wooden-sided truck seemed to last an eternity. It was dark—still no sign of dawn. Hallie remembered how she’d thought that dawn would see her safe in a police station somewhere and felt her stomach turn over with fear.

  What would dawn bring now?

  And would she have the courage to face it?

  Chapter NINETEEN

  Hallie was grimly surprised to see that she and Adam were being returned to Mrs. Grigsby’s house. The neat, white house on the edge of the Green seemed too normal a place in which to await execution.

  Yes, execution. There was no other word for it. She and Adam had to deal with the fact that they would be killed immediately after Becky’s public burning.

  “Just a little something extra for The Goddess” was the way Reverend Thoreson had put it when they parted. He made it sound so reasonable. So harmless. Hallie and Adam—a couple of last-minute Beltane add-ons to help make the corn harvest a smash success this year.

  Norman and the others brought them into the house through the cellar entrance.

  It must have been a part of the old, original house, Hallie noted, because the steps were crude and uneven and ended in what appeared to be some sort of storage area—a series of damp, musty rooms with bumpy dirt floors and low, beamed ceilings.

  The room Hallie and Adam found themselves in was the one farthest away from the steps and the most strongly built and heavily reinforced room in the cellar. The door was of thick oak, studded with iron nails, and the room’s one window was set high in the wall and was barred with heavy, wrought-iron crosspieces.

  Escape would be impossible.

  Is this some kind of prison? Hallie wondered. How many people doomed for execution in the name of The Goddess spent their last nights here?

  Adam, still bound hand and foot, had been carried into the room and dumped on the floor like a sack of potatoes. He grunted when he landed, and he tried to sit up.

  “You can untie him if you feel like it, Missy,” his captor said, grinning. “It will give you something to do . . . while you wait.”

  While we wait. For Becky’s horrible death. And ours.

  How would they die, Adam and she? At least not by fire. That was evidently being saved for the Fire Maiden. So how? What had the vicar said about The Goddess not wanting her offerings bruised or damaged? Did that mean they would be suffocated? Or drowned? Poisoned, maybe? Those were the only ways of being killed she could think of at the moment that didn’t leave marks.

  Maybe it won’t be too painful. Maybe they’ll do it quickly. Maybe they’ll give us something to knock us out first. One of Mrs. Grigsby’s herbs. Maybe we won’t even see it coming.

  Maybe.

  Hallie bent over Adam. He wasn’t saying anything. Just half-sitting, half-lying there. She knew those ropes must hurt. So why wasn’t he saying anything?

  “I’ll have those ropes off you in a couple of minutes, Adam.”

  Still no answer.

  Hallie broke a couple of fingernails untying the knots that held him. She almost smiled, remembering how she used to think that a broken fingernail or a zit before a big date was such a tragedy.

  “That feels better, Hallie,” Adam said, rubbing the circulation back into his ankles. “Thanks.”

  He didn’t meet her eyes but just sat looking down at his feet.

  “Look, Adam,” she told him. “You put up a good fight back there, but we didn’t have a chance. There was nothing we could have done to escape.”

  Now he looked up and met her gaze. “I don’t feel that way. I feel responsible for getting us all into this mess—Becky, you, me. God, Hallie, I’m about to go crazy.”

  Hallie sat beside him and leaned back against the rough stone wall.

  “None of this is your fault,” she told him. “It just happened.”

  When he didn’t reply, she went on. “You know, Adam, all our lives our parents and teachers have tried to keep us from hurting ourselves. How many times have they told us not to run with scissors in our hands? Not to go out in the snow bareheaded? But nobody ever told us not to visit a pretty little village where the people believe in human sacrifice, did they?”

  Adam smiled faintly and H
allie felt encouraged. She didn’t want Adam going to his death feeling as though he’d let Becky and her down. He’d always been a good friend and one of the nicest people Hallie knew. Above all, she didn’t want him to die thinking it was all his fault.

  “That damn van, though,” he mumbled. “I never should have bought it. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Lots of kids our age buy cars that turn out to be lemons. That doesn’t mean they’re going to wind up in a place like Holyoake,” she said.

  Adam patted her on the shoulder. “You’re okay, you know that, Hallie?”

  If only I felt as brave as I sound, Hallie thought.

  “Look, Hallie,” Adam said, beginning to sound like himself again. “It’s not over yet. The Beltane ceremony is still hours away. Maybe we can get out of this place.”

  He stood up and shook his legs, first one, then the other. “My feet are still asleep.”

  Hallie got up too. “You’re right. We can’t just give up. Then we really will go crazy. At least we can go down fighting.” Hallie looked around the room. “The door is thick, though, and there’s a huge bolt on the outside—I noticed it when we came in. No chance of getting out that way.”

  “If the bolt’s on the outside, they must keep things locked up in here, right?” Adam asked grimly. “Probably things that try to escape.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking,” Hallie said. “This place must double as a jail. And I guess that means we aren’t the first people to be put in here for safekeeping. The men who brought us seemed to take it for granted we can’t get away.”

  “I wonder if this is where they kept Simon’s folks. Before they . . . you know,” said Adam.

  “I’ve been afraid even to think of him for fear of jinxing him,” Hallie said. “He wasn’t in the woods with the others, Adam. I’m scared they know he was the one who told us about following the stream up over the mountains.”

  “But they didn’t say anything about him,” Adam reminded her. “Maybe he’s over at the church with Mrs. Grigsby.”

  “I hope so. I’d hate to think we got him into danger, too.”

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about Simon now,” Adam said. “Our only chance of helping him is to get out of here ourselves, if we can.”

  But the odds are we can’t, Hallie thought. After all, Simon’s parents lived here. If they didn’t know how to break out of this cellar, there’s no way we’ll know how.

  “We could try the window,” Adam suggested hopefully. “Those bars look old and rusty. Maybe we can work them loose.”

  The moonlight streamed in through the barred window, making a pattern of crosses on the wall. Hallie looked up at the beamed ceiling. “I guess this room wouldn’t have any kind of light fixture, would it?”

  “I can’t see one,” Adam answered. “This place probably started out as an old-fashioned root cellar. They never bothered to put in electricity.”

  On the far wall were several rows of shelves. Hallie went over to them. “Maybe I can find a lantern or a candle.”

  She groped around and finally found the stub of a candle. Holding it up to the moonlight, she could see that it was ragged, chewed. She remembered hearing how mice and rats loved wax and nearly threw the candle to the ground in revulsion. Ugh! To be touching something some filthy rodent had been chewing on!

  But this was a new Hallie. Instead, she felt around among—probably—rat droppings, searching for matches. There were none.

  “I’ve got a candle but no matches,” she reported. “You don’t have any, do you?”

  “Are you kidding? You know I don’t smoke. It shortens your life expectancy,” he said glumly.

  “I guess we’ll have to work by moonlight, then,” Hallie said.

  Adam was standing at the window on a large wooden box he’d found, reaching up and yanking on the bars. “These bars are so old, they give a little when I pull on them.”

  Hallie tried not to get her hopes up. “Do you think there’s a chance we can pry them loose?”

  “Maybe not pry, but we can try to pull them out.”

  Adam unbuckled his belt and removed it. Then he attached it to one of the bars, pulling the belt through the buckle. He gave it a couple of tugs, testing it.

  “Come on, Hallie,” he said, helping her up on the box. “Maybe if we both pull . . .”

  They pulled and pulled in unison. The bars wobbled a little but didn’t give.

  “They’re embedded too deep in the stone window frame,” Adam said at last. “I’ll have to try to dig them out.”

  “Do you have a pocketknife?” Hallie asked. “You know, one of those Swiss Army things?”

  Adam looked at her with an odd expression on his face. “My mother never let us have pocketknives. She was afraid we’d hurt ourselves.”

  It was too much. Hallie and Adam both burst into wild, hysterical laughter.

  After a moment Hallie caught her breath. She felt better. “Maybe we can find something to use as a shovel—an old spoon. A tin can. Anything.”

  Adam looked down at his belt buckle. It was large, heavy, and made of some kind of metal.

  “My cousin sent me this from Texas,” he said. “It’s a genuine Dallas Cowboys belt buckle. And it’s got this big hook on the back. See? Where it’s supposed to fit into the holes in the belt. Maybe I can dig the bars out with it.”

  He attacked the masonry around the iron bars.

  Hallie watched as he gouged valiantly at the stone. Hours seemed to go by. Actually it was only minutes, from what she could see by a moonlight check of her watch. Finally Adam uttered a muffled curse.

  “What happened?” Hallie asked.

  “The hook broke off,” Adam replied testily. “I’ve always been a Redskins fan myself.”

  “Did you loosen the bars any?”

  “No. That stone looks old and wobbly, but it’s pretty strong. I’m afraid it would take a masonry drill to dig those bars out of there.”

  Neither spoke for a moment. Finally Hallie said, “Listen! Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Birds. I heard chirping. That means dawn is about to break.”

  Dawn. May the first. Beltane.

  The bonfire. The bonefire. The sacrifice of the Fire Maiden.

  And where was Becky right now? Was Mrs. Grigsby keeping her doped up with those herbs of hers?

  Hallie fervently wished that Becky would be so heavily drugged she would be spared the suffering of the flames. Becky, the Fire Maiden, the human sacrifice that would supposedly bring fertility and the blessings of the mythical Goddess to this loathsome place.

  “Dawn?” Adam said. “But it’s still pitch black out there.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard that it’s always darkest before dawn?” Hallie asked him. “In just a little while the sun will rise, and . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  “And Becky will die. Then us,” Adam said. He sat down heavily and put his hands over his face.

  There was a movement at the window. A face thrust through the iron bars.

  “Simon!” Hallie yelped.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” he whispered. “When the signal guns went off, Aunt Phoebe made me stay with her. And then the vicar summoned me after you’d been brought back to Holyoake. He’s had me with him and the elders all this time, talking about tomorrow.”

  He pressed closer against the bars.

  “Listen to me,” he commanded. “Don’t give up. I’ve got a plan.”

  Chapter TWENTY

  Hallie hopped up on the box. She was so glad to see him, she could have kissed him, even through the bars.

  “Simon!” she said again. “We’ve been so worried about you. We thought maybe they knew you’d helped us and—”

  “Some help,” he said. “You didn’t get very far.”

  “That didn’t have anything to do with you,” Hallie said. “Becky was so out of it she decided to chat with the guards.”

&nbs
p; Adam joined them at the window. “Better keep it down,” he cautioned. “Someone might hear you.”

  Simon looked back anxiously over his shoulder. “Right. We don’t have much time—we’ve got a lot to talk about if we’re going to get you out of here.”

  “We’re getting out of here?” Hallie echoed. “Please don’t tell us that if it’s not true. It only makes things worse.”

  Against her will, tears puddled up in her eyes and ran silently down her cheeks.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Hallie.” Simon reached through the bars and took her hand. His face was level with hers.

  What a kind face he has, Hallie thought. Why didn’t I notice that right from the start?

  “I really mean it,” Simon was saying. “There is a way out of here.”

  “How?” Adam asked in a low, tense voice. “Will it put you in any danger?”

  “No,” Simon said. “They don’t suspect me in the least. I’ve managed to convince them that helping out with the Beltane sacrifice is my top priority.”

  He’s supposed to kill me, Hallie remembered. That’s how he’s supposed to help out with Beltane.

  “Here’s the situation,” Simon told them. “There’s only one person guarding you, and he’s up in the kitchen. Aunt Phoebe’s over in the Place of Worship with Becky and—”

  “What are they doing to Becky?” Adam broke in worriedly. “They aren’t hurting her, are they?”

  “No. She’s okay. They’ve got her so doped up, she doesn’t know who or where she is. They don’t want her to figure out what’s going on and put up a fight.”

  “Good,” Hallie said. What had been worrying her most was the thought that Becky would become aware of what the villagers were planning to do to her. She was glad now that Mrs. Grigsby was keeping her zonked out.

  “Can you handle the guard in the kitchen?” Adam asked.

  “No problem. I’ll knock him out with one of my aunt’s teas. I know more about her herbs than she realizes. Once he’s unconscious, I’ll come down here and unbolt your door.”