Handpicked

by Dani Oden

  Hannah interjected, "A cheap knife is still a knife. It just means they don't require fancy-ass blades when they do their animal sacrifices." She put her hands down on the carpet next to her and carelessly ran her fingers over the fibers. "Where I'm from, any knife covered in black wax is bad. It doesn't matter if it's new or old, cheap or expen--"

  She abruptly stopped moving her hands and gaped at the two of us, stunned.

  "What?" I asked, leaning toward her.

  Hannah raised her left hand slightly, bringing carpet up with her. Fibers had caught in her bracelet, and an entire corner of the flooring lifted right up.

  "How high does it go?" Lindy anxiously propped herself up onto her knees.

  Hannah lifted her arm, pulling up a square of carpet about twelve inches long on each side. It dangled from her bracelet like a wind chime on a spring day.

  On the floor remained splotches of black wax, which had been holding the square in place. The wax surrounded an indentation about three inches deep, protected by a hefty piece of plexiglass perfectly fitted to it.

  "Okay, that's smart," Lindy observed, her voice a mix of amusement and anxiety.

  In the center of the indent was a small plastic switch, much like the beige ones that turned on the lights in our rooms.

  I ran my hand over it, and even tried to slide my fingernail in between the tiny gap made by the hardwood floor that framed it, but my nail was too small and too thin to do anything.

  "Here," Lindy said, pushing the knife across the carpet to me. I used the blade to pop out the glass, giving the three of us a chance to examine the switch more closely.

  "Is that what the knife was for all along?" I asked my friends. No one had an answer for me.

  The three of us knelt around the switch, all peering from different directions.

  "Do we flip it?" I asked.

  "No," Hannah said.

  "Yes," Lindy said emphatically, glancing at her.

  "Did you know this was coming?" I asked my best friend. "Do all sororities have this kinda stuff?"

  She shook her head, "I honestly don't know."

  “Was this what it was like when you guys found the robes?" Hannah asked warily.

  "No, this is weirder," Lindy said.

  "Do you think this will make the wall move?" Hannah continued.

  "I do," I said.

  "And then we'll be in a secret room within a secret room," Lindy concluded.

  "Nothing good happens in secret rooms," Hannah said, tugging at her sleeves again.

  I nudged Lindy and motioned to the switch. "Do you still think any of this is fake? Like these are all props?"

  Lindy resolved, "I don't know anymore. They're going pretty far with it if this is all just here to mess with us."

  "If it's not fake, is there any good reason for them to have hundreds of witch robes and a knife hidden in a secret closet, guarding a trap door?" I asked.

  "I can think of one," Hannah piped up.

  “What is it?” Lindy said.

  "They’re doing creepy-ass shit,” she declared, standing up. “That’s the reason.”

  "You're leaving?" I said.

  "This is fucking weird, you guys. I don't want to be a part of it anymore."

  "You can’t go,” I said.

  "Why not?"

  "The whole reason we even came was so you'd be caught up on what we saw," I reminded her.

  "I don't see any robes anywhere," she said indignantly.

  "Seriously?" Lindy crossed her arms. "That's your argument?"

  Hannah said, "I'm not trying to argue, I'm just...I don't want to go any further. This is too much. I'm going back to bed."

  "You can sleep? After this?" I asked.

  "Maybe," she said, but I didn't believe her.

  "Without knowing what's behind the wall?" Lindy said.

  She paused. "Well, you'll tell me, won't you?"

  Lindy and I made eye contact, silently considering her question. "Probably. But it would be better if you stayed," my best friend said.

  "We're in this together," I reminded her. "You should stay."

  Hannah sighed heavily.

  "So?" Lindy finally prompted her.

  "Fine," she said, sitting back down on the floor.

  "So, we're going to flip the switch?" I said. “And see where it takes us?”

  "Okay," Hannah said.

  "Let's get it over with." In one fluid motion, I reached past Hannah and Lindy, wrapped my shaking fingers around the switch, and flipped it.

  ELEVEN

  Judging by the humming sound coming from inside the wall, the switch had turned on some kind of motor. The panels rattled their way into a space just large enough to hold them, like one of the sliding doors on my parents' wine cellar. Another familiar-looking switch glared ominously at us, and before we could argue again, I flipped it on.

  Hannah gasped, and Lindy stiffened next to me. It was just a light, thank goodness.

  I'd expected another dark and dreary closet-sized space, but what I got was much different. White paint, glass sconces on the wall, and a curved stairwell leading downward, lined with the same cream-colored carpeting running through the entire house. It smelled dusty and the air coming from the stairwell was cooler than the rest of the library.

  "Holy sh..." Hannah trailed off. She was pale and shivery, like she'd just stepped out of a cold swimming pool.

  I tiptoed to the top of the stairs and peeked around.

  "What do you see?" Hannah said, keeping her distance, as if we were near the edge of a tall building.

  "Nothing," I reported. "The stairwell curves, that's all I can tell from up here."

  "We didn't say what would happen if the door just led to another place we'd have to decide on," she said hopefully.

  Lindy noted, "It's almost five. If we're going to do this, we should do it now." Her eyes were growing tired and the skin underneath them was getting darker.

  I held my arms out to my friends so we could link elbows. Too exhausted to argue anymore, together we went down the winding staircase just wide enough to fit us. With each step, the stairs creaked ever so slightly.

  At the bottom of the stairs, we arrived in a large, open room. Hannah found a floor lamp and when she turned it on, similar lamps came on around the room. Even though we were in a basement, tan draperies crisscrossed from the ceiling dramatically and lined the white walls. Rows of honey-toned wooden benches, similar to church pews, faced the front of the room. There sat a long table and eight chairs on one single raised step the size and shape of a choir riser. The wood was much lighter than the rest of the house, making it feel more cheerful than some of the other spaces. The same racks of robes we'd seen the night before were haphazardly pushed into the corner, as if someone intended to come back to them and properly put them away later. In such a bright space, they actually didn't seem so bad. The last thing I noticed was actually one of the focal points of the room. Our letters, the I for Iota and B for Beta, were painted on the wall in the front of the room, over the crest Kayla had explained to us just one week prior.

  "Chapter room," Lindy exhaled. "It's just our chapter room."

  We unlinked our arms and began exploring. I started at the side table right at the entrance. An Iota Beta Ritual Handbook sat neatly atop it, along with an old, melted candle in a holder. I slid open the drawer, only to find more candles and matches. "I'm guessing we do stuff with candles when we're initiated," I said.

  Hannah circled the perimeter, stopping at the robes. "These aren't what I thought they'd be," she observed.

  "What did you expect?" I said.

  "I don't know, I can't decide if they're scarier than I expected, or not as scary..." her voice trailed off as she leaned in to inspect them carefully.

  I slid the drawer closed and wandered over to Lindy, who was squatting next to three boxes stacked alongside one of the benches. "What is it?" I peered over her shoulder.

  "I have no idea," she said, handing me a piece of paper. I
t was full of X's and O's, with arrows and lines and symbols more complicated than football plays on a chalkboard. The top said "Day 1."

  "Is this...choreography?" she said, squinting at the page.

  "No, there's too much going on," I said, as if my four weeks as a freshman cheerleader made me an expert on dance routines. I flipped the sheet around to see if that made it clearer. It definitely didn't.

  Lindy pulled out another page. "This one says, 'Day 4.'"

  I leaned over and studied the page in her lap. It was hard to see at first, but underneath all the scribbling was kind of floor plan, sprinkled with more X's and O's. This time, every X had a number next to it, and every O had a letter.

  She pulled out another. This one was titled "Preference."

  It hit us both at the same time. "Rush..." Lindy breathed. "It's the dining room."

  "They are precise," I said, skimming the page. "Seating?"

  "It has to be," she agreed.

  "Do you think the numbers mean anything?" Lindy said, running her finger over the page. "I sat somewhere over here," she said, pointing to a table with X13-X16, and 0L-0P.

  "I bet they do, but I have no idea what," I said, then added, "I think I was over here." I pointed to a table with X9-X12.

  I knelt down next to her, and together we dug through the boxes, pulling out sheets and sheets of diagrams and notes.

  At the front of the room, Hannah's steps were echoing as she approached the table and chairs. I was about to call her over but before I could, she shrieked and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  "What is it?" Lindy asked, letting the page in her hand drop to the floor.

  Hannah frantically shook her head, backing up toward the wall with the giant letters and the crest on it, until she hit it and jumped. Lindy and I abandoned the boxes and ran to her.

  I saw it first. I stopped short about six feet from the table, and Lindy did the same seconds later. A chill radiated throughout my body, as she audibly gagged.

  Sitting on a round wooden plate was a hand. A human hand.

  It was slightly grayish, the color of pale clay, and what should have been the wrist was instead a jagged mess of skin and uneven veins, like it had been ripped off of someone. The palm was down, the fingernails painted bright red, the cuticles ragged and the knuckles wrinkly.

  "What the hell?" Hannah finally said. Her watery eyes had progressed into scared tears that streamed down her face.

  Lindy clutched my arm, staring. "Oh, shit," she whispered.

  "Where did it come from?" I choked out.

  "Does it matter? It's here, it's here in our house," Hannah stammered.

  I tried looking away, at the floor, at the ceiling, at my friends, but it didn't work. My eyes kept going right back to the hand and my stomach lurched every time. "It can't be real," I sputtered. "There's no way, they're messing with us again."

  "You think?" Hannah said earnestly.

  "Maybe it's for some fake hazing joke they're going to play..." I trailed off.

  Lindy took a careful step towards the table.

  "Don't touch it!" shrieked Hannah.

  "I'm not going to," Lindy said. My best friend, the aspiring doctor, peered at the hand. "It might be real," she said grimly, standing up straight again.

  "Check it again," Hannah said. No one moved, and she shouted, "Check it again!"

  "Let's stay calm," I said, directing it at Hannah.

  "She's right, we need to look more closely," Lindy said.

  "How do we check it? What do we do?" gasped Hannah.

  Lindy, who had been the coolest and most collected when our tenth grade Bio class had dissected frogs, gulped. To Hannah, she said, "Can you go get some of those pages from the boxes over there? A big stack of them. Doesn't matter which ones."

  Hannah peeled herself from the wall and obeyed. She didn't come back up on the step, but she did place an armful of papers next to our feet. "Now what?" she asked, trembling.

  "Go sit on one of those benches," I told her. Retrieving the papers, I held them close to my chest and watched Lindy, trying to tell what she had in mind.

  "You guys aren't going to touch it, are you?"

  "No one's going to touch it," Lindy said. I hoped it was true.

  Hannah sat in the front row of benches, staring up at us. Lindy went back and forth between the hand and the papers. "I just need it lifted, and I need to see what happens when it moves. I think I'll be able to tell."

  "Have you seen a dead hand before?" Hannah called.

  "No," Lindy shook her head, still concentrating.

  "How come you'll be able to tell--"

  "She took AP Physiology last year," I told Hannah truthfully, hoping it would quiet her. "And we dissected frogs in tenth grade."

  Hannah bit her lip and gripped the seat with her hands, rocking slowly. Trusting she'd stay there for a minute, I turned back to Lindy. "You need me to lift it?"

  "I think so," she said.

  “Why can’t you lift it?”

  “Cause I’m going to bend down and get a closer view.”

  I looked at the hand, imagining it moving, trying to picture the person it was once attached to. "I'm not sure--" I began.

  "You can do it," she told me firmly. "You've got this."

  I inhaled deeply, nodding. "The paper is...my gloves?"

  "I thought it would help," she said.

  "I'm not going to watch. I'm going to hold my hand out, and you just move it where it needs to go. Okay?"

  "Okay," she said.

  I thought about saying something about how she was my best friend, and I trusted her to be fast and to not make me do it for any longer than was absolutely necessary. Instead, I just swallowed and nodded at her. I didn’t need to say it.

  I positioned myself arm's length from the table, my heart heaving aggressively. I turned my head sharply to the left, like when I got shots as kid. Lindy tore some of the pages to fit my grip and gently steered my arm down until the paper touched the hand. I couldn't make out texture or temperature through the pages, only that it was slightly squishy.

  "Okay, please grip it and lift up," Lindy said.

  Like a baker picking up a donut with wax paper, I closed my fingers around the wrist and followed her instructions. I cringed as I lifted. It was heavier than I expected.

  "Oh," Lindy breathed.

  "What? What is it?" Hannah said, bordering on hysterics. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  "There's something underneath, maybe some kind of jewelry," Lindy said.

  "What kind of jewelry?" I said, keeping my head sharply turned.

  "I-I'm trying not to get too close, but I think it's a pin. It's gold, and there's stones, and some kind of symbol. Letters, or a crest maybe," she peered downward. After a brief moment, she said, "It's definitely the Iota Beta pin."

  "And the hand?" I said. I opened my eyes, but didn't dare turn toward it.

  "Can you rotate it, like, an inch?"

  "Which way?"

  "Clockwise.”

  I followed her instruction and she squatted down, staring up at it.

  "Can you turn it again, one more inch? And tilt the front part up?”

  I obeyed, my neck craned to the side so hard it was hurting. I caught Hannah's eye, and we stared at each other, daring the other to look away.

  "Oh my gosh," Lindy said suddenly, jerking back. I turned instinctively, in time to see a tiny piece of flesh falling from the inside of the gaping wrist hole. I screamed and dropped the hand. It fell hard, slamming into the wood floor, spraying tiny flakes of dried guts in all directions. Lindy and I jumped back so fast we toppled into each other but, thankfully, remained clean from the mess. Bloody, smeared pages fell from my own hand and drifted to the ground, landing peacefully on the small pieces of whatever came from inside the hand.

  "It's definitely real," she gasped.

  We clamored over each other, trying to get up without pushing the other back down. I raced toward the stairs, grabbing Hannah on my way.
>
  Lindy was only a few steps behind me, still dazed. "Wait,” she said.

  I pivoted to face her and shook my head, continuing to walk backwards toward the door. "Can we please go? We need to go. Please let's go,"

  She fumbled to pull her phone from her pocket, desperately pushing buttons to unlock her screen.

  "Are we calling the police?" I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Not venturing closer than five feet from the table, she leaned over and snapped two photos. We'd made a huge mess, with the hand tossed onto the floor, and stained, ripped pages of their rush chart on top of the chaos. Lindy shoved the phone into her pocket and ran to catch up to us. "We need proof of what we saw, just in case," she said, out of breath.

  Together we made it back through the closet, past the fireplace, and into the library. The three of us heaved the brick wall closed and shoved the foam piece back into place.

  "What about the other hidden wall? The lights? They’ll know someone was down there," Lindy said.

  "Fuck it," Hannah said. "I'm not going back."

  "Me either," I shook my head definitely.

  TWELVE

  As fast as we could Lindy, Hannah and I tore out of the library, practically knocking the table over in the process.

  Back in my closet room, I was the first to speak. "We need to get out of this house," I panted.

  Hannah asked, "Where should we go?"

  "Canada?" I said.

  "Should we go somewhere on campus? Coffee shop? I don't even know what's open right now. What time is it, five-something?” Lindy said. The sun was just beginning to rise outside.

  "The school library is twenty-four seven," I pointed out.

  "Hell no, I don't want to be in a library right now," Hannah said.

  "Let's just go somewhere, I don't care where," I said.

  We were outside and down the street in under a minute, dodging solo cups dropped by party-goers, orphaned beer bottles and not one but two pairs of discarded women’s underwear left out on the sidewalk in front of one of the fraternities.

  No one said a word until we were a few blocks away from Iota Beta. "That was a human hand, right? We all saw?" I finally asked. We came to a standstill right where the line of grand fraternities and sororities stopped and houses turned into the sleepy rentals occupied by our college classmates.